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The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".
- saulrh 15y agoI'm kind of surprised that this hasn't appeared in the news before, given how important an issue it is for technical writing. After all, you don't tell someone to delete a line in vi by typing "dd."
- jeffool 15y agoNow if only ISO 8601 date formatting would catch on... (yyyy-mm-dd)
- dspillett 15y agoI'm with you on that. If only MSSQL Server wasn't broken in the way it interprets that if your user locale is set to UK English (give it a string formatted that way in other locales and the behaviour is as expected, in "English (British)" it sees the format as yyyy-dd-mm).
- eftpotrm 15y agoI'm British, I've worked with a large number of clients' SQL Server installs. I think I've only twice seem yyyy-dd-mm as a default behaviour, yyyy-mm-dd was far more common.
- dspillett 15y agoI've only seen it assume yyyy-dd-mm when the user's locale is set to "English (British)". In most instances I've come across this setting is just left at the default ("English", which implies "English (American)") even if everything else in the stack is localised for the UK, so the oddity isn't noticed. My build instructions now explicitly state that "English (British)" should not be used due to the way it affects how dates in strings are interpreted when the format NNNN-NN-NN is seen.
- eftpotrm 15y agoOdd. From memory, the safest format to use is actually yyyymmdd (without the hyphens) though, which is apparently supposed to be interpreted unambiguously by SQL Server.
- hessenwolf 15y agoAh, the old 112 instead of 120 format.
- eftpotrm 15y agoY'know, I got so fed up with memorising those numbers at an old job that I built a view that enumerated all the valid ones against GETDATE() :-)
- hessenwolf 15y agoI have a formatDate() function lying around somewhere, but I cannot create functions or views on many of the DBs. convert(varchar(8), @myDate, 112) seems a daft way to go about things - and I have been wondering if I have been doing something wrong...
- eftpotrm 15y agoAgreed. The CONVERT syntax is rubbish, but the output is so much more powerful. I'd rather have an equivalent of Date.ToString("YYYY-mmm-DD hh:mi:ss.ssss") in SQL but, sadly.... It could be written as a UDF but I'm not sure performance would be up to production use. I had a wonderful stack of little helper functions and views I'd cobbled together at that job and had had free rein to stick into the real databases; they made development so much easier. The downside of employment though, that sort of work gets stuck with each employer you do it for and can't so easily be carried around like a toolkit. I experimented a bit with some of the code from http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archive/2010/12/10/96089.aspx http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archiv... a while back on some toy projects; it makes some interesting reading and had me building a few similar functions around my own conventions and rules. On a larger scale, I would be sorely tempted to build something like that into the Model database and insist on a clean output as part of the approval criteria.
- pradocchia 15y agoyyyymmdd is the only safe format on MSSQL.
- furyg3 15y agoAlso: 24h time with no timezones.
- unwind 15y agoWhy no timezones? Do you propose that all times always be given as 24-hour UTC?
- furyg3 15y agoExactly. With international communication on the rise, it's best (IMHO) to do away with the timezone concept, and just use one time format everywhere. India is +5:30, Nepal is +5:45, California observes DST but Arizona doesn't... the EU does, but they start and end DST a week before the US... It's ridiculous. The initial gut reaction against this is that people would hate waking up at 18:00 and going home at 8:00, but I think people would get used to this pretty quickly. After all, we do this twice a year as it is.
- Djehngo 15y agoConsider also that there is one hour per year which does not exist and one hour per year which happens twice (at-least within the context of local time if you live in an area with daylight savings) There is also Namibia which used to lose hours in daylight savings time and Bangladesh which had dst in 2009 then dropped it, this makes historical time calculations tricky.
- bonzoesc 15y agoTimes should really be given as Miami Internet Beats[1], since it's compatible with everyone in US Eastern and doesn't have antiquated concepts like "hours," or "minutes." [1]: http://miamibeats.org/ http://miamibeats.org/
- jeffool 15y agoI agree with this. yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.ss Also? The Holocene calendar, and the International Fixed Calendar. But then, I'm a nerd.
- Derbasti 15y agoHow about going metric?
- knshaum 15y agoCharles Stross does that in his novel Glasshouse: durations are described in kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds. (100Ksec is just under 28 hours -- a reasonable proxy for a day -- and 1 Gsec is about 31 years.) In a space-faring society, with no standard astronomical day or year, it made sense.
- henrikschroder 15y agoIt's the national standard in my country! (Then again, it's the national standard of two whole countries, everyone else ignores it. :-( )
- rimantas 15y agoThe same in mine. I had no idea it was so rare :(
- EdiX 15y agoOne is china, I think. Which is the other one?
- henrikschroder 15y agoLast time I checked it was Sweden and Japan. Dunno if more countries have seen the light since. :-)
- angus77 15y agoThat's the way it's not only written, but spoken in Japanese.
- Sukotto 15y agoJapan uses three different calendars, depending on context. Imperial / kōki which counts from alleged founding of Japan in 660BC Era / nengō which counts the years from the start of the Emperor's reign European / seireki adopting the International standard date counting from the alleged birth date of Jesus Christ Today is 平成23年5月13日 of Mikado Heisei, the 125th Emperor of Japan
- angus77 15y agoIn all three systems, it is both written and spoken year-month-day, which was the point. Kōki is not used by anyone with a straight face in this day and age. "Mikado Heisei" is an extremely uncommon way to refer to the emperor. "帝平成" gets 724 hits on Google, and "Mikado Heisei" gets 6, in 5 different languages---the first of which is your post above. Even the Japanese-language wikipedia page on him doesn't use the word "帝" anywhere.
- run4yourlives 15y agoYes please! I'm sick and tired of people arguing that you put the month first because "That's how you say it".
- hugh3 15y agoOf course you only say it that way in America. Today is the Thirteenth of May, not May 13. I prefer dd/mm/yyyy to yyyy/mm/dd though, just to keep what is usually the most important information at the front.
- Pistos2 15y agoI like YYYY-MM-DD for two reasons: 1) Sorting the string representations sorts in time order. 2) It eliminates ambiguity almost completely, because extremely few places use YYYY-DD-MM. The ambiguity of most ##/##/## dates is irritating.
- run4yourlives 15y agodd-mm-yyyy can easily be confused with mm-dd-yyyy. The only format that is obvious is yyyy-mm-dd.
- hugh3 15y agoUntil somebody starts using yyyy-dd-mm and screws everything up. Besides, often when you write dates you leave the year off entirely.
- r00fus 15y agoI prefer how we did it in the military: 13MAY2011. mysql: %d%b%Y No ambiguity, easy to parse and 3-letter month is natural delimiter between day and year numbers.
- _delirium 15y agoI wonder if Wikipedia adopting that style has had any influence on its popularity online, or if that's an example of convergent evolution. It was decided way back in 2002 to use the logical punctuation style there, in a fairly ad-hoc way when it was still a small project. Part of the motivation appears to have been a sort of UK/US compromise. It's since been reworded significantly, but this was the original style suggestion there (introduced on August 23, 2002): In most cases, simply follow the usual rules of English punctuation. A few points where the Wikipedia may differ from usual usage follow. With quotation marks, we suggest splitting the difference between American and English usage. Although it is not a rigid rule, it is probably best to use the "double quotes" for most quotations, as they are easier to read on the screen, and use 'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations". This is the American style. When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within the quotation marks. This is the British style.
- gwern 15y ago> Part of the motivation appears to have been a sort of UK/US compromise. That may've been part of the reason, but why were we trying to have a UK/US compromise when the user base was so small? I suggest that it's the previously mentioned programmer habit of using logical quotation, and what occupation was heavily represented among early Wikipedians...?
- joeyh 15y agoLike the two spaces after a sentence rule, the traditional quote style has much to do with typesetting. And so in the monospaced, limited font, early online setting, those rules were not very relevant, and were often ignored. When it wasn't being overdiscussed. Waaay before Wikipedia. Now, the programmer style is actually different from these. You'll occasionally see a programmer write «He said "Foo.".»
- rflrob 15y ago>When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style, if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side, they both replied, in essence: "How about never? Is never good for you?" It seems to me the next logical question here is, "why not?" Just about the only arguments in favor of "American" punctuation are tradition and some hazy sense that periods outside qoutes look wrong, whereas the best argument for logical punctuation is that the point of writing is to communicate clearly, and logical punctuation is more clear at virtually no cost.
- Derbasti 15y agoAs a non-native speaker, this is one thing I found very irritating about American English writing. It never made sense to me to put something in quotes that is not part of the quote.
- gmac 15y agoAs an English English speaker (writer), I concur!
- po 15y agoHaving grown up in the American system, I have to confess that this has always bothered me but I didn't realize that it was only American writing! I guess I never noticed it when I read well-edited british source material. Now that I know doing it the 'logical' way is also considered conventional, I'm going to have a hard time doing it the American way anymore.
- javert 15y agoI think the American style looks better in non-fixed-width fonts, because it looks much closer to the way actual handwriting should look: the comma or period underneath the quotation mark. I suspect this is the reason people started doing it that way in the first place. And I suspect people started doing it that way on both sides of the Atlantic. It's just that Britain ended up standardizing one way, America the other. (Possibly yet another instance of English language usage evolving more quickly in Britain than in America.) I'd appreciate if anybody can confirm or deny this hypothesis. And I find it disappointing that the Slate article has no historical treatment of the issue. (Honestly, both styles look weird to me in fixed-width fonts, which basically arose in tandem with the modern computer.)
- vorg 15y agoComputer fonts nowadays should be able to change ." and ". so the . is under the " and ditto ," and ", so the , is under the "
- bonzoesc 15y agoSomebody should totally engineer a font that does that; if Zapfino can have a special ligature for "Zapfino," you could certainly make ones for '".', '",', and '";'. And yes, I just mixed punctuation styles. Period-in-quotes simply looks better.
- Silhouette 15y agoThe technology to do this has been around for some time if you want to. However, this is the first time I recall seeing anyone advocate it for normal usage, and I have never encountered a pro-grade font that is typeset this way by default. Why would you want to remove potentially significant ordering information from punctuation, particularly when multiple punctuation marks in close proximity tend to be confusing enough already?
- pw 15y agoA 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)." I don't doubt Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that we are simply accustomed to the style.
- zwischenzug 15y agoIs there a recognised difference between: The Rise of "Logical Punctuation". and He said, "I've been outside". ? To me, "logical" punctuation in the first case would be as written, and in the second case would be: He said, "I've been outside.". indicating that both the enclosing and enclosed sentence is complete.
- atakan_gurkan 15y agoPunctuation is supposed to remove ambiguities, and help you read and understand more easily. In your example He said, "I've been outside.". the collection of punctuation marks does very little for making the sentence more understandable, and (IMHO) looks ugly. The name "logical punctuation" is just a name for the style, do not take the word "logical" too literally.
- limmeau 15y agoPerhaps "compositional" would be more appropriate.
- vacri 15y agoIt's implicit in the closing quotes that you've reached a pause or end of some kind.
- zwischenzug 15y agoNot necessarily: He said, "I've been outside.", but I don't believe him.
- vacri 15y agoI don't see a conflict there: He said, "I've been outside", but I don't believe him. The period within the quotes adds nothing.
- zwischenzug 15y ago
- ars 15y agoI've been doing this for years despite knowing what it's "supposed" to be. I'm glad to finally not be in the minority. And I had no idea it had a name or that it was common outside the US.
- jrockway 15y agoAlso according to the Internet, "you" is spelled "u". Everyone should adjust their internal dictionaries so that u don't become an establishment sellout. Personally, it makes sense for "scare quotes" to not contain punctuation, as they are not complete sentences. But it doesn't make sense for direct quotes to not contain punctuation, as in `He said, "Hello there".' He didn't say "Hello there", he said "Hello there." (It might seem logical to have two periods in that case, but it's ugly, so the second one can just be omitted for maximum conciseness. That's why the period goes inside the quotation marks. Similarly, it would be confusing and ugly to pretend to end a sentence in the middle of a sentence, so quotes that are not at the end of the sentence "end" with a comma. The period is a pretty strong message to pause, and you don't want to overuse it. IMO.)
- delinka 15y agoI'm pretty sure the article is in agreement with you that when the punctuation is part of the quote, then it remains in the quotes. For example, he said "Hello, there."
- _delirium 15y agoWith the end-of-statement period, I agree you can make that case, but it's done with other punctuation as well, since the American rule is more of a typographical rule than a semantic one (you put low-on-the-line punctuation before high-on-the-line punctuation). For example: British: "I would not", he objected, "enjoy that". American: "I would not," he objected, "enjoy that." The period is arguably part of the quoted statement as you say, but the comma definitely isn't.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoStrange. I am British and I was taught your American style. And have always done it that way.
- timknauf 15y agoThe British style would actually include the period/full stop in this case, since it's quoted speech and the quoted speech ends with a period.
- perlgeek 15y agoJust imagine a programming language where you have to write print "some text," function(), "moretext"; instead of print "some text", function(), "moretext";
- metabrew 15y agoJust imagine having to write perl in the first place ;P
- getsat 15y agoprint "some text," function(), "moretext;"
- InclinedPlane 15y agoprint("some text," function(), "moretext;)"
- limmeau 15y agoIn Forth, you write ." some text" to print 'some text' without the leading blank. But that's for a completely different reason.
- j_baker 15y agoYou know, I think the next INTERCAL may come from ideas like this.
- freiheit 15y agoThat's clearly inconsistent, it should be: print "some text," function(,) "moretext;"
- stretchwithme 15y agoI've been ignoring that rule for a long time. If it wasn't in the original, it doesn't go in quotes. And another thing. Using "an" when a word starts an H is followed very inconsistently. In fact, I only seem to hear it in the phrase "an historic". "An human" doesn't really speak that way.
- dmoney 15y agoAnd another thing. Using "an" when a word starts an H is followed very inconsistently. Is that a rule in American English? I don't remember hearing it in school.
- Arubis 15y agoAs best I recall, the rule is based on pronunciation, not on spelling. So for words where the "h" is pronounced, you treat it as a consonant and lead with "a": "go for a hike." Whereas for words where "h" is silent, so pronunciation thus leads with a vowel, you lead with "an": "it would be an honor." "Historic" is pronounced differently, mostly based on region. You can go to "a historic occasion," with hard H, or "an 'istoric occasion," with a soft one. Or, for native speakers: type what you'd pronounce.
- cageface 15y agoAn herb? An hour? An horchata?
- telemachos 15y agoSure, but there's also 'an historical novel' - less likely, unless you are a character in said novel. I would say that the real rule is not about the letters (vowel or consonant), but the sounds. So, you receive 'an MBA' because it's pronounced 'an em-bee-eigh'.
- hugh3 15y agoIncidentally, the soft h on "herb" is one of the things that bugs me most about American English (and it took me several years of living here to even figure out that it was consistently done that way). Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Americans pronounce a hard "h" on "herbivore"? How does "herb", then, lose its h?
- guelo 15y agoWell if we're going to start making English logical we have a lot of work to do.
- nodata 15y agoSimplified English has been around for a while, there's even a Wikipedia language for it: http://simple.wikipedia.org/ http://simple.wikipedia.org/ iirc Lincoln was a big proponent of it.
- hugh3 15y agoAnd it still hasn't caught on, which probably indicates that it never will. Though actually, many of the differences between US and proper English spellings come from Webster's attempts to rationalize the English language. It didn't work.
- adambyrtek 15y agoI wonder what are your thoughts on the double-spacing after full stops. I find it terrible, but I know projects who enforce this style in code comments.
- redcap 15y agoYou should only double-space if you use a typewriter. If you use a computer to write your text, and especially if it's going online, one space is all you should need to use.
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoWeird. Last week I just made a commitment to start doing this the "correct" way. I find it's very difficult after years of programming, though. Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps. The inconsistency between caps drives me nuts, even though I know it's the "right" way to do things. It's fascinating to see topics like this kind of float around for months or years and then suddenly become news items. Wonder if a shift is really happening? Or is the story just noticing a trend in people making the same mistakes?
- gpambrozio 15y agoIt's weird that this just got to the home page of hacker news too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544198 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544198. I've never heard about 'logical' puctuation before and today I've seen it twice in HN alone....
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Silhouette 15y ago> Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps. The "rules" for titles are particularly stupid. A title is almost invariably distinguished in some other way. If it's a heading, it is typically printed in bold if typeset and underlined if written by hand. Citations are normally printed in italics when typeset and written within quotation marks by hand. Meanwhile, it has been shown beyond any doubt by now that Capitalising Every Word Except a Few in Some Arbitrary Fashion Hurts Readability, which is particularly damaging when you're talking about text that readers will often want to scan at speed.
- justincormack 15y agoDown in England title caps like that went out around the 1950s. Compare say the UK Guardian with the New York Times and there is a huge readability difference. US print newspaper design is very retro, like the UK was in the nineteenth and early 20th century.
- wccrawford 15y agoEven though I have followed the 'proper' way all my life, I recently realized that there are many instances where having the punctuation inside is confusing. I now have absolutely no problem putting it on the outside when it's less confusing. I'm seriously considering putting it on the outside all the time now.
- mrseb 15y agoAs a British tech blogger who writes on American tech sites, I've spent a lot of time arguing this particular subject with editors, copy editors, and proof readers. Grammar should help the reader, not hinder. Logical/readable grammar all the way.
- telemachos 15y ago>> If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. 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)." I don't doubt Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that we are simply accustomed to the style. This is the real story here I think: people invented the rule to suit their preferences, but over time we've forgotten the rule's origin and now treat it like a holy truth. (Or worse yet a matter of "grammar"! Run, run - you've made a grammatical mistake!) You are likely to discover this over and over again if you study the background of many rules that (some) writing teachers insist on and that people like Lynn Truss use as an excuse to foam at the mouth. Here are some of my least-favorite myths, in no particular order: + You should never end a sentence with a preposition. (Sheer bullshit: English uses countless phrasal verbs ('throw away') and in many other cases avoiding the final preposition produces stuffy nonsense.) + You should never split an infinitive. (A completely made-up rule, based on mistakenly trying to apply Latin rules to a Germanic language.) + The word 'hopefully' can only mean 'in a hopeful spirit' and therefore you shouldn't say, "Hopefully, we'll arive before lunch tomorrow." (Sheer bullshit again: 'hopefully' there functions as an adverb modifying the entire clause 'we'll arrive before lunch tomorrow'. The sentence as a whole clearly and obviously means "It is to be hoped that..." or less formally "We hope that..." This use of 'hopefully' is no different than 'fortunately', 'sadly', 'happily' or 'luckily' in countless sentences.) + Don't start sentences with 'but' or 'and' or 'however'. (Just goofy.) + Never use the passive voice. (Overdoing it at the least: Yes, a lot of beauraucratic and other bad writing uses the passive in excess, but the passive is not per se evil or always wrong.)
- jgfoot 15y agoAdherence to arbitrary grammar rules is a signal. It shows that the writer has training in what the rules are, and the ability to follow them. To some readers, this can be a signal of credibility. I don't care if the rules make sense; I care if someone will think less of my writing if I break the rules.
- DannoHung 15y agoThe Chicago Manual of Style can go jump in a ditch. American style is terrible and should be abandoned immediately.
- chris_j 15y agoI'm British and, when I was at school, we were taught that punctuation should go inside the quotation mark. This was one of those horribly prescriptive rules, the breaking of which was considered very wrong indeed. I'm surprised that this article calls this "American Style", given my experiences. I started ignoring the convention pretty when I started using computers because, as the article says, it's hard to defend it on merits and it just looks plain odd, especially in a fixed-width font.
- frobozz 15y agoI'm British, and it's only in the last few years that I've heard of the American compulsion to modify quotes by adding punctuation. I'm glad it seems to be vanishing.
- cynicalkane 15y agoI'm American, and I was taught to use the "British style". In fact, I didn't even realize there was an "American style"--I always considered it a punctuation error, though I guess it's common and inconspicuous enough that I didn't even realize publications like the NYT would make this 'error'.
- Muzza 15y agoA recent development in Swedish - at least in online communications - is the use of the French manner of putting a bloody space in front of exclamation marks ! Looks awful.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Goladus 15y agoInformal writing rarely features narration to any significant degree, which is where the so-called American Style is most "logical" to the extent that we're even really talking about logic. In forums and email and texting, quotes are usually either blocked-off text, or the quotes are used to specifically emphasize an exact character string (often a single word). Wikipedia is also generally not about narration, and quotes are usually meant to be exact. With narration, the goal is not to convey exactness rather to tell a story. Interrupting a character's quote to insert ", he said," influences the original meaning (if there even is such a thing) no matter where the punctuation lies. But that's not important because specifying precisely what a character said usually isn't the point of a story. Furthermore, if you write your own sentence, and finish with quote of an entire sentence, why isn't there a period for both sentences? Brian said, "let's go.". Looked at this way, it's easy to see why, given the choice, narrators would choose the more aesthetically pleasing placement inside the quotation marks.
- username3 15y agoShouldn't it be: "Brian said, "[l]et's go.".?"?
- maw 15y agoI like quotation dashes for dialogue. The French style can be somewhat ambiguous (although it rarely results in a problem). The style commonly used in some other languages is both elegant and easy to read. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_marks#Quotation_dash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_..., paragraph starting with "In Italian, Catalan, ...."
- 15y ago
- StuffMaster 15y agoYeah, I thought the period-inside-quotes thing was stupid and only used it when I had to for school. Stupid stupid stupid.
- jenniart 15y agoThis is something I've struggled with in my writing, especially as someone who's done blogging and AP style writing for a news outlet... Sometimes I write a sentence that might end in a question mark, which shouldn't be a part of a quote and rather placing the punctuation mark outside of the quotes (or inside for that matter) I end up completely re-working the sentence to avoid the problem. But I would have to agree that it doesn't always make sense to stick so firmly to that grammar rule. It's nice to see that I'm not alone in that thought.
- benarent 15y agois it me or is this site using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol) "" instead of quotation marks? “ ” .
- MatthewB 15y agoGood. I never quite understood why I was putting punctuation inside quotation marks all these years, besides the fact that my teachers told me that it is the right way. Let me see how this feels when I use "logical punctuation". Yes, that feels good.
- kenjackson 15y agoAs a teen I refused to put the punctuation in the quotes, because it felt wrong to me. I wish I had a better articulation, or even knew that the British did it the way I did. I had a teacher who consistently dinged me on it, but I persisted. Finally I've been vindicated!
- Groxx 15y agoBeen doing it for years, never looked back. Quotes should delimit the quote, your period is outside that quote. The closest I get is where a comma would work in a quote, and the writing interjects the speaker. e.g., "Grab that," foo barred, "and get over here", because "Grab that", foo barred, ", and get over here" is fugly.
- stcredzero 15y agoTry writing a parser that recognizes punctuation inside the quotes, then try to write one that recognizes it outside. It's quite clear that the latter is cleaner and simpler.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- SeoxyS 15y agoIt amuses me that an article about punctuation and typographic conventions completely ignores the standard of using typographer’s quotes instead of inch marks. “This,” instead of "this." Same goes for apostrophes versus foot marks. As a graphic design student myself, I am quite snobbish about using perfect typography. This includes proper quotation marks, as well as following the rule of putting periods and commas within quotes. (I also follow the rules religiously when it comes to en-dashes versus em-dashes and hyphens, and when to uses spaces around them. I also make sure to only use a single space after period.)
- Locke1689 15y agoThe resolution here seems obvious to me: when you find yourself in a bike shed conversation, go with the standard. If, however, one option or the other is preferable for some practical reason, choose that option.
- blahblahblah 15y agoOf course the period should follow the quotation marks. Periods, exclamation marks, and question marks are the delimiters for English sentences and belong at the end in the same way that a semicolon belongs at the end of a line in C/C++.