5 ms·

The Rise of “Logical Punctuation” (2011)

61 points by anishathalye 11y ago

quanticle 11y ago
The author admits that "logical punctuation" is an equally valid form, and can even point to publications for which it is the house style. So why is he taking points away from his students when they use it? It strikes me as a rather petty way of enforcing a particular stylistic choice where it doesn't really matter.
NvidiaCUDA 11y ago
It looks wrong to see punctuation outside the quote mark. It slows down my reading.
loopbit 11y ago
It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me). It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  That's funny, because it seems to me like the Oxford comma is the logical rule. The American standard is a special case: "use a comma to separate items in the list, except the 'and' substitutes for the comma before the last time".
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English. When used to form a list in spoken English, these short pauses create a kind of rote rhythm: "While you're at the store, buy milk, carrots, rice, flour, and chocolate." In reading written English, the "grocery list" effect can carry over, and I often find it undesirable, particularly for small sets that carry their own rhythm[1]. I don't have any such difficulty with logical style. If anything, it's the reverse: Preserving the original "nesting" makes it clearer how the sentence would and should be read, aloud or mentally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... (Note that Jefferson's original version with a nominal "Oxford comma" repeats the ampersand as well, which produces a nice alternative effect).
    - zyxley 11y ago
      > My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English. But exactly that's how I parse things in lists. For example: "Life (short pause) Liberty (short pause) and the pursuit of happiness".
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    See I didn't grow up thinking I was using commas to separate list items, I grew up thinking I was contracting a bunch "and"s. That is: A red one and a blue one and a green one and a purple one. became A red one, a blue one, a green one and a purple one. Notably kids seem to do the first one naturally. If commas were list separators and not just a short hand why would we end them with "and" at all.
    - ashearer 11y ago
      Possible reason: to distinguish the list from an "or" list.
      - Avshalom 11y ago
        It was more of a rhetorical question from 6-8 year old me. Yeah, though, and certainly there's other reasons, like distinguishing it from a bunch of dependent clauses. That we elide "and"s when speaking a list is of course a point in favor of the comma being a separator not a replacement too. At the end of the day it's English; we just do what feels good.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    The American standard is logical: command and "and" are interchangeable: "A and B and C" "A, B, C" "A, B and C" The Oxford style is inconsistently, doubling up command and "and" in the last item. This is silliness. There are two styles because English grammar is a not a precisely logical formal language. Neither side is wrong; English is ambiguous.
- NvidiaCUDA 11y ago
  I use the Oxford comma. Otherwise you end up with ambiguous sentences like: "This book is dedicated to my Parents, God and Ayn Rand."
danso 11y ago
Oh wow, the American-style has always just felt wrong to me and I've just chosen to ignore it in my personal writing, for most of the reasons stated in the article. But I've had to write it professionally, as a reporter, because of the Associated Press style guide [1]. Good to know there's an actual substantive debate...but of course there is; there always is a big debate when it comes to anything grammar :) [1] https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apstyle.pdf https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apsty...
abruzzi 11y ago
The author misses another big cause--the auto period on iOS puts it on the outside. Something that always bugs me, and I'm constantly going back and correcting.
ctdavies 11y ago
This claim is unfounded: "the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is;"
- egypturnash 11y ago
  I have read mountains of professionally-edited prose in my lifetime, and I still use the "logical" punctuation when I write. I know damn well it's not the "proper" style here in the States. Hell, my attachment to logical punctuation extends past quotes. If I'm ending a sentence with a hyperlink, the period goes outside the [link]. Except in the rare cases where I'm linking to something with a period in its name. I wonder if Mr. Yagoda is still giving students a point off for ever use of logical punctuation in their papers, or if four years of fighting his futile battle for MLA/AP usage has finally worn him down.
  - infogulch 11y ago
    A hyperlink is an especially problematic example, as periods are valid in a url (even if it's a bit unusual to end with one).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Avshalom 11y ago
This seems like a good place to use ligatures to shrink most of the white space between quotes and following punctuation marks. I do it when I'm writing informally because yeah it's the sensible way to do it, but it does sometimes look awkward.
n0us 11y ago
"As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions." These were always the worst type of teachers. When the majority of students are telling you and insisting that you are wrong, you are most likely wrong. This is especially true when they are able to provide a justification for their answer. When a quote is used it is my firm belief that what goes inside the quotes should be a literal copy of whatever you are quoting. A full stop or a comma can in some cases modify the meaning of the quote and should not go inside the quotes because it makes the meaning of the quote ambiguous. For example if I used the above quote at the end of a sentence it would be unclear if the quote itself contained the period or if the period was just there to close my sentence. Grammar has changed significantly over time and will continue to change. The argument that "that's the way we do it" doesn't hold water in my mind. It was a poor way of doing things to begin with so we should change. </rant>
- nkurz 11y ago
  I tend to agree with you, but I'd like to understand better the mental process that leads him to penalize students for an approach that he concedes is logically preferable. My guess is that he thinks he's doing them a service by showing them how their writing will be judged "in the real world". Perhaps someone who agrees with the author's approach can offer better insight?
  - ldmoray 11y ago
    The author teaches courses on Journalism. Agree with the logical style all you want, professional journalism is written according to style guides, and those style guides more often than not dictate American Style punctuation. In this case, "the real world" includes the newspapers his students wish to end up employed at. In the case of a professor taking marks off for punctuation issues when writing essays on history or economics or engineering, I agree that's wasteful.
    - jdietrich 11y ago
      The "real world" of journalism is now highly globalized and casualized. Young journalists should expect to work for a large number of publications as interns, freelancers or short-term staffers. In this climate, adaptability is a core skill. It is perfectly appropriate for an instructor to specify a style for an assignment and grade accordingly. Dogmatically teaching only one style is outmoded and actively harmful.
tzs 11y ago
I agree that things not part of the quoted material should not be inside the quotes. However, I don't see why that means they have to be outside the quotes. There's a cozy and quaint area below the quote that could serve as a wonderful place for a period or comma to settle in and set up shop to ply its trade. I'd like to see quote-period and quote-comma get ligatures.
- anishathalye 11y ago
  It does seem like this should satisfy people on both sides of the argument.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ZenPsycho 11y ago
  There is a historical case for this, as the entire reason for the "illogical" style to exist in the first place is to emulate period under quote in professionally typeset (with metal) prose, but using the limited medium of the typewriter. The limitations of typewriters have also led to a number of other conventions baked into american style guides, such as placing two spaces after a period. It's amazing how strongly these odd rules are being held onto well after the typewriter has been made irrelevant.
twic 11y ago
I'd be interested to know more about the origin of the illogical punctuation. All the article says is: > According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)." So, quotes come into use to mark quoted passages in the 17th century [1], and are used inside punctuation. Other European languages develop similar or different conventions for quotes, but (based on a quick look at some newspaper websites), all put the quotes inside the punctuation. Typesetters across Europe happily follow this convention for the next three centuries and counting. But some time in the late 18th or early 19th century, American typesetters suddenly realise that it looks better the other way round (and at some point persuade the Canadians too). An observation which has apparently escaped the typesetters of the old world, of whom there are probably ten times as many, for a century or two. This doesn't make any sense. Why did the Americans actually adopt this convention? Was this Noah Webster up to his old tricks again? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History
- Avshalom 11y ago
  It's possible that we did it as an intentional Americanism. Which I hear is how we ended up drinking coffee over tea.
  - civilian 11y ago
    Coffee was also a big cash crop in the new world and would have been a lot cheaper in the U.S. than in Europe, so maybe that was it?
- gpvos 11y ago
  I don't know. But I do know that the Dutch style is the same as the American style, as I think are several other continental European styles.
  - gpvos 11y ago
mkehrt 11y ago
I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was customary to print the quotation marks over the period,which can be done on a printing press.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  I am not a graphic designer, but I did work in the publishing business earlier in my career, and this is exactly how I was taught to lay type up by hand: The quotes go somewhat over the period. There are similar things going on when you put quotes at the beginning of a line: They hang out a little over the margin. If you have a period, like this. “Followed by a quote, like this,” The space between the period and the quote will be smaller than the space between a period and a capital letter. Most of this matters most with large type, such as titles or block quotes.
  - lolc 11y ago
    Interesting detail. So technology should fix what technology broke and the debate would be over.
    - vorg 11y ago
      It's already done. Unicode provides non-spacing modifiers which will overlay the previous codepoint. So you can type, for example, either U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) or U+030b (COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT) over the period or comma.
      - lolc 11y ago
        I was wondering about that. But I don't think accent characters are intended for that. They don't seem to work for punctuation. We would have to use COMBINING DOT BELOW with a zero width space. "This looks baḍ̋ Edit: Actually make that a space, maybe it's the proportional font "This looks still bad ̣̋
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Stick a fork in it, it's done. I was typing in a list of blurbs this morning, titles for a to-do list. I thought about putting the punctuation the "right" way inside the quotes, then didn't do it. At some point it's better to get your message across clearly than it is to follow strict rules. Relatedly, we're starting to see the rise of two words joined together, aka JavaScript, or SyFy. Looks like computers are doing all sorts of odd things to our punctuation.
alexwebb2 11y ago
I never liked the idea of changing the content of a quote for any reason. Let's say I go on the record saying something like this: > Code reviews are worthless when it comes to those nasty little runtime corner cases that crop up now and again. I sure as hell wouldn't want you writing the following: > Mr. So-and-so was quoted today as saying "Code reviews are worthless." Punctuation isn't just there for decoration. It has meaning. Injecting full stops into quotes in places they don't actually exist not only doesn't make any logical sense, it can actually change the meaning of the quote in very significant ways.
- curun1r 11y ago
  Moreover, in the tech world, these punctuation characters often have actual technical meanings and being precise can be very important. For example, consider the following punctuations of a quote: - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com.". - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com". - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com." Only the first and second quotes are unambiguous. The third, which is supposedly correct, is unable to differentiate between a meaningful trailing period, which in DNS means to not use search domains, and the period inserted to end the sentence. While these issues are rare, logical punctuation solves this problem.
nmc 11y ago
After reading the article and most of the comments, I still find one point unclear: if the period does logically belong inside the comma, does it also end the sentence? For example: > He wrote "I live here." Then he stopped writing. > He wrote "I live here.". Then he stopped writing. Of course the latter is the least aesthetic, but is it not the most logical?
- breadbox 11y ago
  Yes. If a quote ends with a period, then it ends the sentence. If the sentence shouldn't end there, then the period is replaced with a comma (even if the quote was of a complete sentence). > He wrote "I live here," and then he stopped writing. This rule only applied to periods, though -- if the sentence ends with (say) a question mark, then you leave it in: > He wrote, "Do I live here?" and then he stopped writing.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    I would have put a comma after the last quotation mark. Personally, I think instructors put too much emphasis on punctuation. I had one instructor ding me for not spelling out numbers between 0-10. I still don't know if he was right. I don't really care. Looking back he had some issues. This Doctor would love to argue with the boys. We were all so young. We didn't understand why he would make such a big deal out of little errors. Dr. B said, "Come to my office after class!" Looking back, I'm suprised he didn't offer us wine in those pointless office visits.
maaarghk 11y ago
Fast forward about 15 minutes to where a student in the class codes up a linter for essays which changes correctly presented quotes to the style the teacher requests. LaTeX + Gulp!
- civilian 11y ago
  Oh huh, it's weird to think about microsoft word's spelling and grammar checker as a linter. I like that it. It sure would have been cool to be able to write custom lint rules when I was writing a lot of history papers. Like: If I start two neighboring paragraphs with the same word, as long as that word isn't "The" or "A". (This was a bad habit I had...)

61 points by anishathalye 11y ago

The author admits that "logical punctuation" is an equally valid form, and can even point to publications for which it is the house style. So why is he taking points away from his students when they use it? It strikes me as a rather petty way of enforcing a particular stylistic choice where it doesn't really matter.

NvidiaCUDA 11y ago

It looks wrong to see punctuation outside the quote mark. It slows down my reading.

loopbit 11y ago

It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me). It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.

CWuestefeld 11y ago
That's funny, because it seems to me like the Oxford comma is the logical rule. The American standard is a special case: "use a comma to separate items in the list, except the 'and' substitutes for the comma before the last time".
- twoodfin 11y ago
  My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English. When used to form a list in spoken English, these short pauses create a kind of rote rhythm: "While you're at the store, buy milk, carrots, rice, flour, and chocolate." In reading written English, the "grocery list" effect can carry over, and I often find it undesirable, particularly for small sets that carry their own rhythm[1]. I don't have any such difficulty with logical style. If anything, it's the reverse: Preserving the original "nesting" makes it clearer how the sentence would and should be read, aloud or mentally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... (Note that Jefferson's original version with a nominal "Oxford comma" repeats the ampersand as well, which produces a nice alternative effect).
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English. But exactly that's how I parse things in lists. For example: "Life (short pause) Liberty (short pause) and the pursuit of happiness".
- Avshalom 11y ago
  See I didn't grow up thinking I was using commas to separate list items, I grew up thinking I was contracting a bunch "and"s. That is: A red one and a blue one and a green one and a purple one. became A red one, a blue one, a green one and a purple one. Notably kids seem to do the first one naturally. If commas were list separators and not just a short hand why would we end them with "and" at all.
  - ashearer 11y ago
    Possible reason: to distinguish the list from an "or" list.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      It was more of a rhetorical question from 6-8 year old me. Yeah, though, and certainly there's other reasons, like distinguishing it from a bunch of dependent clauses. That we elide "and"s when speaking a list is of course a point in favor of the comma being a separator not a replacement too. At the end of the day it's English; we just do what feels good.
- gohrt 11y ago
  The American standard is logical: command and "and" are interchangeable: "A and B and C" "A, B, C" "A, B and C" The Oxford style is inconsistently, doubling up command and "and" in the last item. This is silliness. There are two styles because English grammar is a not a precisely logical formal language. Neither side is wrong; English is ambiguous.
NvidiaCUDA 11y ago
I use the Oxford comma. Otherwise you end up with ambiguous sentences like: "This book is dedicated to my Parents, God and Ayn Rand."

danso 11y ago

Oh wow, the American-style has always just felt wrong to me and I've just chosen to ignore it in my personal writing, for most of the reasons stated in the article. But I've had to write it professionally, as a reporter, because of the Associated Press style guide [1]. Good to know there's an actual substantive debate...but of course there is; there always is a big debate when it comes to anything grammar :) [1] https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apstyle.pdf https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apsty...

abruzzi 11y ago

The author misses another big cause--the auto period on iOS puts it on the outside. Something that always bugs me, and I'm constantly going back and correcting.

ctdavies 11y ago

This claim is unfounded: "the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is;"

egypturnash 11y ago
I have read mountains of professionally-edited prose in my lifetime, and I still use the "logical" punctuation when I write. I know damn well it's not the "proper" style here in the States. Hell, my attachment to logical punctuation extends past quotes. If I'm ending a sentence with a hyperlink, the period goes outside the [link]. Except in the rare cases where I'm linking to something with a period in its name. I wonder if Mr. Yagoda is still giving students a point off for ever use of logical punctuation in their papers, or if four years of fighting his futile battle for MLA/AP usage has finally worn him down.
- infogulch 11y ago
  A hyperlink is an especially problematic example, as periods are valid in a url (even if it's a bit unusual to end with one).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Avshalom 11y ago

This seems like a good place to use ligatures to shrink most of the white space between quotes and following punctuation marks. I do it when I'm writing informally because yeah it's the sensible way to do it, but it does sometimes look awkward.

n0us 11y ago

"As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions." These were always the worst type of teachers. When the majority of students are telling you and insisting that you are wrong, you are most likely wrong. This is especially true when they are able to provide a justification for their answer. When a quote is used it is my firm belief that what goes inside the quotes should be a literal copy of whatever you are quoting. A full stop or a comma can in some cases modify the meaning of the quote and should not go inside the quotes because it makes the meaning of the quote ambiguous. For example if I used the above quote at the end of a sentence it would be unclear if the quote itself contained the period or if the period was just there to close my sentence. Grammar has changed significantly over time and will continue to change. The argument that "that's the way we do it" doesn't hold water in my mind. It was a poor way of doing things to begin with so we should change. </rant>

nkurz 11y ago
I tend to agree with you, but I'd like to understand better the mental process that leads him to penalize students for an approach that he concedes is logically preferable. My guess is that he thinks he's doing them a service by showing them how their writing will be judged "in the real world". Perhaps someone who agrees with the author's approach can offer better insight?
- ldmoray 11y ago
  The author teaches courses on Journalism. Agree with the logical style all you want, professional journalism is written according to style guides, and those style guides more often than not dictate American Style punctuation. In this case, "the real world" includes the newspapers his students wish to end up employed at. In the case of a professor taking marks off for punctuation issues when writing essays on history or economics or engineering, I agree that's wasteful.
  - jdietrich 11y ago
    The "real world" of journalism is now highly globalized and casualized. Young journalists should expect to work for a large number of publications as interns, freelancers or short-term staffers. In this climate, adaptability is a core skill. It is perfectly appropriate for an instructor to specify a style for an assignment and grade accordingly. Dogmatically teaching only one style is outmoded and actively harmful.

tzs 11y ago

I agree that things not part of the quoted material should not be inside the quotes. However, I don't see why that means they have to be outside the quotes. There's a cozy and quaint area below the quote that could serve as a wonderful place for a period or comma to settle in and set up shop to ply its trade. I'd like to see quote-period and quote-comma get ligatures.

anishathalye 11y ago
It does seem like this should satisfy people on both sides of the argument.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ZenPsycho 11y ago
There is a historical case for this, as the entire reason for the "illogical" style to exist in the first place is to emulate period under quote in professionally typeset (with metal) prose, but using the limited medium of the typewriter. The limitations of typewriters have also led to a number of other conventions baked into american style guides, such as placing two spaces after a period. It's amazing how strongly these odd rules are being held onto well after the typewriter has been made irrelevant.

twic 11y ago

I'd be interested to know more about the origin of the illogical punctuation. All the article says is: > According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)." So, quotes come into use to mark quoted passages in the 17th century [1], and are used inside punctuation. Other European languages develop similar or different conventions for quotes, but (based on a quick look at some newspaper websites), all put the quotes inside the punctuation. Typesetters across Europe happily follow this convention for the next three centuries and counting. But some time in the late 18th or early 19th century, American typesetters suddenly realise that it looks better the other way round (and at some point persuade the Canadians too). An observation which has apparently escaped the typesetters of the old world, of whom there are probably ten times as many, for a century or two. This doesn't make any sense. Why did the Americans actually adopt this convention? Was this Noah Webster up to his old tricks again? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History

Avshalom 11y ago
It's possible that we did it as an intentional Americanism. Which I hear is how we ended up drinking coffee over tea.
- civilian 11y ago
  Coffee was also a big cash crop in the new world and would have been a lot cheaper in the U.S. than in Europe, so maybe that was it?
gpvos 11y ago
I don't know. But I do know that the Dutch style is the same as the American style, as I think are several other continental European styles.
- gpvos 11y ago

mkehrt 11y ago

I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was customary to print the quotation marks over the period,which can be done on a printing press.

braythwayt 11y ago
I am not a graphic designer, but I did work in the publishing business earlier in my career, and this is exactly how I was taught to lay type up by hand: The quotes go somewhat over the period. There are similar things going on when you put quotes at the beginning of a line: They hang out a little over the margin. If you have a period, like this. “Followed by a quote, like this,” The space between the period and the quote will be smaller than the space between a period and a capital letter. Most of this matters most with large type, such as titles or block quotes.
- lolc 11y ago
  Interesting detail. So technology should fix what technology broke and the debate would be over.
  - vorg 11y ago
    It's already done. Unicode provides non-spacing modifiers which will overlay the previous codepoint. So you can type, for example, either U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) or U+030b (COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT) over the period or comma.
    - lolc 11y ago
      I was wondering about that. But I don't think accent characters are intended for that. They don't seem to work for punctuation. We would have to use COMBINING DOT BELOW with a zero width space. "This looks baḍ̋ Edit: Actually make that a space, maybe it's the proportional font "This looks still bad ̣̋

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Stick a fork in it, it's done. I was typing in a list of blurbs this morning, titles for a to-do list. I thought about putting the punctuation the "right" way inside the quotes, then didn't do it. At some point it's better to get your message across clearly than it is to follow strict rules. Relatedly, we're starting to see the rise of two words joined together, aka JavaScript, or SyFy. Looks like computers are doing all sorts of odd things to our punctuation.

alexwebb2 11y ago

I never liked the idea of changing the content of a quote for any reason. Let's say I go on the record saying something like this: > Code reviews are worthless when it comes to those nasty little runtime corner cases that crop up now and again. I sure as hell wouldn't want you writing the following: > Mr. So-and-so was quoted today as saying "Code reviews are worthless." Punctuation isn't just there for decoration. It has meaning. Injecting full stops into quotes in places they don't actually exist not only doesn't make any logical sense, it can actually change the meaning of the quote in very significant ways.

curun1r 11y ago
Moreover, in the tech world, these punctuation characters often have actual technical meanings and being precise can be very important. For example, consider the following punctuations of a quote: - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com.". - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com". - "Resolve the DNS record for example.com." Only the first and second quotes are unambiguous. The third, which is supposedly correct, is unable to differentiate between a meaningful trailing period, which in DNS means to not use search domains, and the period inserted to end the sentence. While these issues are rare, logical punctuation solves this problem.

nmc 11y ago

After reading the article and most of the comments, I still find one point unclear: if the period does logically belong inside the comma, does it also end the sentence? For example: > He wrote "I live here." Then he stopped writing. > He wrote "I live here.". Then he stopped writing. Of course the latter is the least aesthetic, but is it not the most logical?

breadbox 11y ago
Yes. If a quote ends with a period, then it ends the sentence. If the sentence shouldn't end there, then the period is replaced with a comma (even if the quote was of a complete sentence). > He wrote "I live here," and then he stopped writing. This rule only applied to periods, though -- if the sentence ends with (say) a question mark, then you leave it in: > He wrote, "Do I live here?" and then he stopped writing.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I would have put a comma after the last quotation mark. Personally, I think instructors put too much emphasis on punctuation. I had one instructor ding me for not spelling out numbers between 0-10. I still don't know if he was right. I don't really care. Looking back he had some issues. This Doctor would love to argue with the boys. We were all so young. We didn't understand why he would make such a big deal out of little errors. Dr. B said, "Come to my office after class!" Looking back, I'm suprised he didn't offer us wine in those pointless office visits.

maaarghk 11y ago

Fast forward about 15 minutes to where a student in the class codes up a linter for essays which changes correctly presented quotes to the style the teacher requests. LaTeX + Gulp!

civilian 11y ago
Oh huh, it's weird to think about microsoft word's spelling and grammar checker as a linter. I like that it. It sure would have been cool to be able to write custom lint rules when I was writing a lot of history papers. Like: If I start two neighboring paragraphs with the same word, as long as that word isn't "The" or "A". (This was a bad habit I had...)