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I'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, t
by chris_j 15y ago
I'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'.