39 ms·

Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

612 points by erwald 5y ago

donatj 5y ago
I got in a heated debate about this with a technical writing instructor. Namely, I was ending a question with a quote along the lines of > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all”? The instructor wanted me to put the question mark of the outer sentence within the quotation marks despite the quoted text not containing a question mark. > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all?” I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it felt like a misrepresentation. This being the “correct” way to do it has always irritated me. I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn’t end with the quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since.
- eCa 5y ago
  Yes, this is the reason why, IMHO, the American way is objectively wrong. Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder, but a quotation style that enforces incorrect quotations is not good.
  - pteraspidomorph 5y ago
    It makes some sense if you consider it a representation of the way you'd speak/read the sentence. If you read that sentence out loud, regardless of where you put the question mark you'll have to intone the quote as if the quote was a question, due to its context. So it functions "better" as a reading hint. (Though I'd also prefer to have the punctuation outside the quote.)
  - soraminazuki 5y ago
    It seems wrong because it is. > Question marks and exclamation points have their own rules. > If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/
    - eCa 5y ago
      I have seen things like: > The password is ’%>>~|]#^|,’ which is awesome. Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        I don't think the normal rules of grammar are designed to handle this case. I would probably write something like > The password, which is awesome, is: > %>>~|]#^| This also has the benefit of putting the password on it's own line, which should make life easier for people actually consuming the document.
      - PennRobotics 5y ago
        There's nothing I like more than typing a URL at the end of a sentence and getting the punctuation wrapped up in the URL. /s
- shannifin 5y ago
  Unlike periods and commas, putting question marks and exclamation marks inside the quotation when they are not part of the quote is against AP, APA, Chicago, and MLA style specifications... Granted, I don't know if technical writing typically adheres to some other style, but shoving a question mark inside a quote it isn't part of is definitely not typical of American styles in general.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Correct, but that just shows why the American style is so confusing. That we have to have an exception for more meaningful punctuation marks just serves to confuse, and emphasizes just how bad the default is.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      I didn't even realize that periods were an exception. (as an American) I've always preserved the original quote for all three forms of punctuation, and put a sentence-ender only if there isn't one inside the quote. I'd bet most americans do the same, style guides be damned. IMO, it's also totally crazy to export a punctuation mark out of the quote always.
      - shannifin 5y ago
        True, you really only have to worry about it if you're writing or editing for a teacher or publisher who wants you to adhere to some specific style. The real annoying thing for me (as an American) was having different teachers teach different things in school. (Same with double spaces between sentences in typing and the oxford comma.) At least when the teacher used a style guide, there was a source of consistency I could turn to, even if I disagreed with them.
- beckerdo 5y ago
  This brings up a point related to the double-period/redundancy discussion above. In a slight adjustment of this example, what if the text were a question and the quotation were a statement. Would this be a good construct: Why did Jake believe "the AI was going to kill us all."? Similarly you could have a text statement with a quoted question: Jake asked "would the AI kill us all?".
  - Xen0byte 5y ago
    Very good counter-argument to the non-sensical punctuation mark redundancy argument.
    - beckerdo 5y ago
      Also there are the possibilities for various questions and exclamations. Why did Jake ask "Can I have another biscuit?"? I was frightened when Jake shouted "Who are you?"! My trousers were soiled when Jake shouted "Boo!"! Why did I soil my trousers when Jake shouted "Boo!"?
- dfxm12 5y ago
  I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it felt like a misrepresentation... I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn’t end with the quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since. I appreciate the skill involved in avoiding ambiguity. The hard part is knowing the unknown unknowns, ya know? I read both sentences the same way and can't really fathom why someone else wouldn't! (Of course, I don't have the context of the original quote here, so maybe that comes into play... but I don't know, and probably shouldn't have to!)
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  I think you're right; > Why did Jake believe the AI was "going to kill us all?" This reads, to me, like Jake's quoted sentence was originally a question. If the original sentence was an assertion or a statement, then you're right this fundamentally changes the meaning and strength of Jake's sentence.
- sebastialonso 5y ago
  wow, your instructor is an idiot.
runeks 5y ago
As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.
- bambax 5y ago
  Strongly disagree. This is an abomination. Language and typography have to be elegant in addition to intelligible.
  - reedf1 5y ago
    Would you sacrifice clarity for elegance?
    - ttctciyf 5y ago
      What clarity is sacrificed? Is it in doubt that the sentence ended? The single period favours both elegance and clarity over slavish and unimaginative punctiliousness.
    - bambax 5y ago
      Good question! Perhaps one of the most important questions regarding writing... I would argue clarity and elegance don't oppose one another; elegance means being as clear as possible without being clumsy or heavy handed, and without insulting your reader's intelligence. Said reader is not a machine, they're supposed to be fluent in the language. We should reduce ambiguity as much as possible, but no more than that. Adding signs where no ambiguity remains only worsens the signal to noise ratio.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Besides, if you look at it upside down, you might be tempted to invoke Godwin's Law.
  - 5y ago
hibbelig 5y ago
I think the argument for the American style is aesthetics. I don't like it, but I can understand that there are people who prefer what looks better. TFA did not address this at all, which is a pity.
- programmer_dude 5y ago
  FWIW the British style looks more aesthetically pleasing to me. The American style reminds me of inappropriately mixed brackets: [(]). Cringe.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > for the American style is aesthetics Why would you make a style choice to make something less aesthetically pleasing?
    - programmer_dude 5y ago
      I wouldn't and I don't think I am. The American style is not aesthetically pleasing at all. I think you misread my comment or replied to me accidentally.
      - blitzar 5y ago
        I am in agreement with you - I didnt even know this so called american style existed untill now, it makes no sense at all.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    Oddly, perhaps, I wish programming languages would allow or require mixed brackets when working with open- and/or closed-ended ranges.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > the argument for the American style is aesthetics Absorption of set theory should make one cringe at 'Abc def. Ghi jkl. Mnop "qrs." Tuv...'. The quotation marks are logically included in the section beginning with 'M', then visually escape it.
gerikson 5y ago
The linked article correctly uses "British" to denote the style of punctuation, I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently.
- erwald 5y ago
  uhm, good point, fixed. that was just a mistake. edit: for the record, I wrote the article and also posted it here. so I figured I could take the liberty of changing the title when sharing here.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Also the article's title is more juicy. HN sometimes goes overboard with editing titles. I guess it is a matter of taste.
  - gerikson 5y ago
    This is an interesting service to track this sort of thing: https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently. Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English" is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and England for the UK), as those were the British they most commonly met.
  - Veen 5y ago
    It's best not to though, unless you want to annoy people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most English people will consider it a sign of ignorance too. Beyond that, the "colloquial" use is simply incorrect.
    - 5y ago
trzeci 5y ago
Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your ”helpful“ text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm particularly fond of the French «chevrons», and relatedly, ¡Spanish exclamations! ⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      I would argue that those two choices remain available to you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang. (Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)
    - joombaga 5y ago
      How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.
      - willhinsa 5y ago
        I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.
po 5y ago
The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-quotes-with-periods-and-commas#369110 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typeset-a-quote-directly-above-a-period https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.
  - flyingfences 5y ago
    As I recall, this historically was the standard. In handwriting, the ligature could be and was placed naturally. In professional printing with moveable type, the ligature could be included in the typeset. Only once typewriters were invented and couldn't spare a key for every ligature did the sequential style appear and the British and American styles diverge.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      This seems like it ought to be possible on a typewriter -- or at least, one with a true backspace. I'm not sure if the backspace was an advanced/late feature, though. It seems pretty simple, but mechanical parts are pretty fiddly I guess.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    What ligature would you propose for "? or "!
    - 5y ago
bambax 5y ago
The reason this problem exists is because computers and font libraries don't have all the characters we need. The point or comma should be at the same place as the quotes, under them, not before or after.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >at the same place as the quotes, under them What?
  - OJFord 5y ago
    See po's comment providing SE links for doing it in tex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834
    - bambax 5y ago
      Ah, yes. Exactly that.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        OK, but why? Is this a convention?
        bambax 5y ago
        It looks better and it saves space.
        coldtea 5y ago
        I'd argue the first is subjective (and I don't think it looks better personally). It's also different to how we use the same punctuation otherwise. It does save space, but I'd say that's neither here nor there. It isn't like space for an extra period at the end of a sentence was ever at a premium. At best, for a whole 200+ page book, you'd save a page or so.
coldtea 5y ago
100% agree.
virgilp 5y ago
Is this just a version of "Prefer tabs over spaces when writing code"? Because if so, I already know the outcome of this debate.
- chromatin 5y ago
  No, I think not, because the quotation marks imbue semantic meaning to what’s inside.
rom1v 5y ago
The first time I read a book in English, I thought the quotation mark after the dot was a typo/syntax error (it didn't parse correctly, and it made no sense to me). After so many instances of the exact same typo in the book, I thought the author/editor had a specific problem with ordering quotation marks and dots. It's only when I read another English book with the same "syntax error" that I realized that it was not a bug in English.
bencollier49 5y ago
For some reason, in school in Britain in the 1980s, we were taught rather religiously to always end anything inside speech marks with a comma. I'm not sure where this style comes from, but it confused me terribly and took me years to correct.
- jsmith99 5y ago
  https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-quotation-in-a-comma https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-... suggests this is the style recommended by Oxford Dictionaries.
Tepix 5y ago
This is indeed annoying and illogical when learning english, especially because other languages get it right. The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Also very irritating.
- rom1v 5y ago
  > The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Precision: a non-breaking space (unicode U+00A0) :) LibreOffice or other word processing software automatically replace normal spaces by non-breaking spaces in that case. But in text editors (like vim), we must do it manually (Ctrl+Shift+ua0 on Linux), typically when writing a French text in markdown, it's a bit irritating indeed.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    This is usually configurable, e.g. Compose-Space-Space inserts a no-break space if the Compose key is set up, or AltGr+Space, Ctrl-Shift+Space etc. (KDE has a dialog for customizing this under Settings→Input Devices→Keyboard→Advanced, where there are an impressive 16 possible options. It is just options to setxkbmap underneath.)
- BossHamster 5y ago
  Not only is it irritating, it looks ugly as hell.
  - bambax 5y ago
    It doesn't look ugly at all if the space is of the correct length.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  That's typical of older English typography as well. Here in a book of classics printed in 1910: https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mo... And in David Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753): https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n16/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n...
simiones 5y ago
I think the example sentence contains the worst corner-case of such a system. In general, the . at the end of sentence is the least necessary punctuation mark, and quotations of neutral statements should just always omit it. For example, "this is how a neutral sentence should look like", I would say. I don't think "they saw a vase." looks good even in the middle of a sentence. However, "do I have a question?", or "I am exclaiming something!" do need their punctuation to make sense. Now, it's more ugly when you finish a neutral sentence a quote like "I am surprised!". Of course, there will be cases, especially in literature, where the . will actually add something to the emphasis of a quote. For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period. Even there, doing it like you did and putting the quoted sentence in the middle, not at the end, of the outer one looks about a gazillion times better
ponco 5y ago
I genuinely love how American, Australian, and British, English all differ in these subtle ways. I think another example that gets me is: `e.g.` vs `e.g.,` MS Word favours the `e.g.,` which I never see in Australian English.
- open-source-ux 5y ago
  There are so many small differences between English language flavours, it's fascinating. Going off on a tangent, here's a random example... The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different. In the US: () = parentheses [] = brackets {} = braces (or curly braces) <> = angle brackets In the UK: () = brackets (or 'round brackets') [] = square brackets {} = curly brackets <> = angle brackets (or angled brackets) I prefer the UK version because it is simpler and feels logical. Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
  - flurdy 5y ago
    Surely {} = squiggly brackets ?
    - Izkata 5y ago
      I work with UK and US people regularly, and despite not being an official name this is the only name for those characters that everyone has automatically understood.
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      When writing code by hand I literally just draw mirrored squiggles. (On inspection, only the first stroke at the top reliably indicates direction.)
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Logically, yes, but "curly brackets" is the only term I have ever heard used for these types of brackets. In Canada, which tends to use a lot of UK-isms.
  - 5y ago
ddek 5y ago
Interesting. I've always used the 'British Style', but in a mid-90s junior school in Scotland I was taught to always end quotations with punctuation. I guess I just rebelled.
rozab 5y ago
I was typing out an explanation/justification to the effect that when speaking aloud, the punctuation at the end of the sentence is 'heard' in the last word, even if the word is quoted. We insert a pause before the start of the quote to indicate it was direct, but there isn't a way of indicating whether, say, a question mark belongs inside or outside the quotation. But then I sounded out some examples in my head and realised it would be totally obvious. The inflection of the question is apparent from the beginning of the fragment (¿), not just from the inflection on the last word. I knew this already, of course, but I didn't really grok it, I guess because of the limitations of how we write out punctuation in English.
- john-aj 5y ago
  Also, aren't questions marked primarily by word order rather than intonation in English?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    There are several kinds of questions. The intonation that people think of as characterizing questions is actually specific to yes/no questions. It can be the only feature that marks the sentence as interrogative: "You know him?" is a valid sentence, and it is distinct from the indicative "You know him." There are also what I think of as "question word" questions, and you might think of as "fill in the blank" questions: "Why are you here?" These do not necessarily have the intonation that applies to yes/no questions. Like yes/no questions, they are characterized by subject-auxiliary inversion (the word order constraint you mention), and also like yes/no questions, that inversion is not guaranteed to be present in a question of this type: "Who sent you?" (Note that inversion is possible for "You know him?" ("Do you know him?") and impossible for "Who sent you?"; these are different phenomena.) I would argue that the yes/no question is primarily marked by intonation and the question-word question is primarily marked by the presence of a question word. Word order is affected in both cases, but not the primary indicator of what's going on. (Compare "He said what to the king?" - again, inversion is possible here ("What did he say to the king?"), but not required. In this case, the inverted version of the question is unmarked (normal), and the uninverted version suggests that the speaker wishes to place a special emphasis on something.)
brianmcc 5y ago
Lovely, the grammatical equivalent of where we put our braces, same-line vs new-line :-)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Fifty-fifty: Opening same, closing new. I'll die on this hill!
ur-whale 5y ago
About as good as I can think of a perfect example of a first world problem.
jack_riminton 5y ago
I also prefer the common British use of commas over the oxford comma
qwerty456127 5y ago
What is described as the American style seems weird and never came into my mind. If I would ever stumble upon such a style I would think it's a typo.
macdice 5y ago
Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and you see the contrast. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadians go both ways at random ;-)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  cOnsider tHe pOssible cOmpromises aVailable tO tHe eNterprising lAnguage sTylist!
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  It's less logical even than that. It's almost every word. On the NYT homepage right now, for example, one story is "Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Block Texas From Enforcing Abortion Law". So "From" is capitalised but "to" isn't. Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple Issues Emergency Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw".
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    I'm surprised by this, as the Times has a fairly well-followed style book. I'd be curious if this pattern followed in print or if things are just more lax online. edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content generated online has a looser pattern than the articles generated for this morning's paper.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.
    - BostonFern 5y ago
      It's called title case, and it's not determined by the length of a word but by whether or not a word is minor. The rules defining minor words vary slightly between styles, but they're usually prepositions and articles.
user-the-name 5y ago
The only reason the "American style" exists is a technical workaround: It was easier to damage the expensive lead type used in print shops a century ago if the thin period character was used on the end of the line, rather than the thicker, sturdier quotation mark, so they were swapped as a cost-saving measure. None of this has been relevant for many decades, and people have forgotten the reason for this rule. It was never correct to do, it was a choice to do it the wrong way around out of convenience.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Source?
- anandoza 5y ago
  What about sentences that end in a period without a quote? That seems like it'd be much more common.
xfz 5y ago
I think they messed up; the first sentences of each of the first two examples are identical apart from the reference. > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[1] and > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[3] Second one should be: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.[3]
bumblebritches5 5y ago
You mean using apostrophes as quotes? gross
shannifin 5y ago
Agree with the post; interestingly, in grade school (here in America) I was actually taught both ways depending on the teacher's preference / belief (assuming we were not writing MLA research papers)... this mostly led to perpetual confusion, so we'd often just put the period directly under the quotation. (Of course, couldn't do that for typed assignments.) I remember one of my English teachers accepting both ways because she could never keep it straight herself.
codingdave 5y ago
> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. Why not? We have different vocabulary, different spelling. Our accents are sufficiently different that non-native speakers can't always understand both. So serious question - why wouldn't punctuation also differ?
somishere 5y ago
Logical aspirations aside, punctuation is largely meant to aid in reading. While some marks provide emphasis, most (other than suggesting connectivity) denote a length of pause. Punctuation (or lack thereof) that pulls you out of the flow of the reading is, IMHO, really not in the spirit of things ;)
est 5y ago
The American style is like putting closing bracket at the wrong indentation.
Loic 5y ago
My first association: https://xkcd.com/541/ https://xkcd.com/541/ This is very emotional because we start when being 6 and as such, for many years, you are exposed to only one way to quote or put spaces around punctuation. I am French, living in Germany and working in English 50% of the time. It is interesting that it is only after maybe 15 years outside of France that now my feeling for what is the right way in one language matches the rules. For example: - How do you do? - Comment allez-vous ? Notice the space before the question mark in French. For me, now, it feels right for both, for a long time this was not the case.
Tainnor 5y ago
> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. That's the typical answer a programmer would give. A linguist, or really any kind of sociologist, would rather say: > There is no reason that there should be a single approach to punctuation in the English language.
sbuk 5y ago
Politics and the English Language[0] has this covered, though not directly referencing punctuation; "vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous". [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
- Y_Y 5y ago
  If one is going to look to an authority in English, I think there's none better than Orwell. There are those of the opinion, however, that with regard to "outright barbary" the ship has long since sailed.
- chromatin 5y ago
  Hear, hear. An under appreciated long-form essay that I refer colleagues to frequently.
kdeldycke 5y ago
I tried to implement some linting rules for quotation mark and punctuation once. Took me way too much time and effort. It's mostly trial and error but good enough I guess to highlight the most blatant abuses. Anyway, here is the code: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files
antattack 5y ago
US style is 'wrong' because it requires one to modify the original quote by adding punctuation within the quotes which delineate the quotation.
wombatmobile 5y ago
I didn’t know these different styles were actual idioms, or that one is “American” and the other “British”. I’ve just always been unsure. Now I’ve learned through this discussion that there is no definitive way, I feel freer to play it by ear and write what feels right at the time.
aardvark179 5y ago
I’m not aware of the punctuation mark going outside the quotation being, “British style,” and I’m struggling to find other references to it being so. It’s certainly not what is done in most British typography. Putting the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks has been a thing ever since printing, and I always thought it was done to avoid have an isolated full stop on a printing plate, which could be damaged relatively easily., but this may be a retroactive justification.
MisterTea 5y ago
> In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks American here. I never put periods in the quotes unless the text within the quotes is a full sentence. I also had no idea there was an American or British style regarding quotes.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  American here. Placing punctuation in a quote ending a sentence is how English Composition was taught to me in grade school and in college. I took to Eng Comp early on and had at least one class in the subject from 9th grade in 1993 through my final year of college in 2003. IMHO this is right up there with tabs vs spaces. People are going to have very different takes on what looks aesthetically pleasing based on viewing repetition and training. There is no right answer, since both are widely accepted, only personal preference.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    FWIW, as another anecdatum from an American, I was always taught the "British style" was the correct way, and the "American style" was incorrect. They were never referred to as "British" or "American" though, just "correct" and "incorrect". I prefer the "British" style, FWIW. Maybe it's just what I was taught, but I have encountered arguments for the other way periodically (causing me to have to check), and I always preferred the way I learned for the reasons in the article.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      the "british" style also introduces an ambiguity. Did the original quote contain the puncutation, or does it derive from the outside context? It's pretty clear to me that the correct method (on the grounds of respecting source material) is: "punctuation inside, if it comes from the source, punctuation outside if it's from the outside context". And there are times when quotes aren't even direct quotes, they could be scare quotes. Why the hell would you ever put punctuation inside of a scare quote? I don't think any american would do this. E.g.: Dough is pronounced like "doe." -- TERRIBLE. Stab my eyes out. Dough is pronounced like "doe". -- sensible.
insickness 5y ago
If you were surprised that someone calmly said, "I can't do that," how would you write it? This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do that!" This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"! This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!
- ycombinete 5y ago
  The middle one looks the best. I think the simple answer would be to convey it with words instead of an explanation point.
daviddever23box 5y ago
I grew up in the United States and was taught that which is referred to here as the “British style”; not sure where this notion of an “American style” originated.
transfire 5y ago
I imagine it depends on what you are trying to say... He said, "Will you?" I said, "No!" He said, "Will you"? I said, "No"! He said, "Will you?". I said, "No!". He said, "Will you?"!? I said, "No!" ;)
ctrlp 5y ago
This makes sense to me and looks good. Some other quote style ideas: - use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote; use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy'). - use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-fingered air-quotes look ridiculous). - use double quotes around single quotes when nesting quotes. Avoid nesting more than one level of quotes.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  These are not so much "ideas" as already-common practice, aren't they?
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    UK English uses single quote marks by default, falling back to double quote marks for nesting.
- bhandziuk 5y ago
  What's the difference between scare quotes and a short catch phrase?
  - ctrlp 5y ago
    Scare quotes are emotion/sense markers. They suggest irony, sarcasm, "skepticism", etc... A short phrase is just a short phrase.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
afranchuk 5y ago
I was taught the American way (as I live in the US), but immediately rejected it (even at a young age) and did it the British way, though I had no idea that's what it was called. Besides the week or so when teachers were covering that in their syllabus, nobody ever complained or noted it at all :)
anf0 5y ago
Does anyone have any thoughts on date formats? E.g. d/m/y vs. m/d/y?
- red_trumpet 5y ago
  Just use d/m/y as the rest of the world.
  - riffic 5y ago
    no: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601
- posedge 5y ago
  The only true format is the programmer's yyyy-mm-dd :)
- Akronymus 5y ago
  8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 which can be any of these: YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM YYYYMMDD
  - aendruk 5y ago
    ISO 8601 is proprietary and people can’t even read it without each paying a $170 access fee. Instead, prefer IETF RFC 3339 (mentioned in your link) which is a more practical open standard.
- dcminter 5y ago
  In prose, use month names (i.e. 1st Jan 1979, or Jan 1st 1970). Where numbers must be used for some reason use four-digit-year first if you can. If you can't use the dictated standard or, if there isn't one (raising the obvious question of why that would be), go with the form that will be familiar to most of your readers. In other words, as with all things, prefer unambiguous forms but consider and respect your audience.
- jgwil2 5y ago
jameshart 5y ago
I think, given that this is just some guy’s opinion (it’s not like this is someone who has a job as a professional copyeditor or publisher of a respected style guide), the only real takeaway most people should take from this is: There are various conventions you can adopt around quoted punctuation You, as an individual writer of English prose, have the option of adopting a style you prefer It’s okay for reasonable people to disagree about that
- BugWatch 5y ago
  Basically, all interpunction characters have started as "some guy's opinion". All graphemes for the characters, too. I know the "rules", but I've been also intentionally writing it in what I refer to as "functional style", e.g.: """ Greg's reaction was "But what of the otters?!". Mary's "Nobody cares about otters!" was received with a stunned shock. Joseph calmly said "I'm ambivalent.". But Ophelia just "didn't care". After hearing about the whole ordeal, Mary's brother was livid: "«Nobody cares about otters!»?! She's a bloody otterologist!"... and then he visibly shook, and his face blanked as he slowly collapsed into his armchair, looking broken, repeatingly mumbling to himself "Illogical... illogical...". """ First three are verbatim restated statements; fourth is a partial and/or summary statement (no quoted punctuation); fifth is a very complex example (and a long [but fully functional!] sentence. We also need light-, mid-, heavy-strength commas. :p
fortran77 5y ago
No. I will use a Nations’s preferred punctuation. To do otherwise is rude and inconsiderate.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  So, which nation ("Nations’s"?!?) did you write that for? Do you know where I -- and all the rest of us who saw it -- are sitting as we read it?
codeofdusk 5y ago
This style of punctuation is "logical quotation", not necessarily British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toby- 5y ago
  This is true. You can find the 'American style' in the UK occasionally, especially in fiction – it's not exceptionally rare. But regardless, the styles have come to be known as 'American' and 'British' because they generally are preferred in American and British English respectively, even if it's not absolute: Americans tend to be taught US style, and Brits tend to be taught British style.
cool-RR 5y ago
> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. If you want to go that route, there's no reason for there to be more than one language on Earth. Any attempt to research linguistics should respect the fact that people want to be different from each other, and see that as a valid reason.
amelius 5y ago
Sorry, but I prefer less rules over more rules unless they provide some tangible benefit. This is just rules for the sake of rules.
- dctoedt 5y ago
  > I prefer less rules over more rules As you illustrate by saying "less rules" instead of "fewer rules." (I agree with you: For any language, the less that non-native speakers have to worry about tripping over some finicky rule, the better.)
mmmBacon 5y ago
The American version is often a simplification of the British version. I also find the American version to be more readable. Simpler, easier to use syntax seems preferable to me over verbose style.
rplst8 5y ago
I found this out years ago, and adopted the British style. It makes way more sense and reads better. I'll also put in my two cents here about spaces after a period. I always use two spaces after a sentence and one after an abbreviation. If you only ever use one, there is too much ambiguity around sentences that end with an abbreviation.
- BugWatch 5y ago
  I'd just repeat the dot/full-stop, since I'm of the "opinion" that the functionality should take precedent over looks. Also, I think I will be adopting the double spacing after a sentence.
dhosek 5y ago
The British style works best with the Penguin style of using single quotes for the outer level of quotation rather than double quotes. Part of the reason we write “this.” is for esthetics. Compare: “this.” “this”. ‘this’. The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or last.
- optymizer 5y ago
  What makes it _objectively_ worse? Subjectively, I think it looks better than the first one and as good as the last one.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    The period gets pushed out into isolation by the quotation marks. In Verdana, which is the default font for text on HN, ” is fairly narrow, but for other typefaces, the effect is quite dramatic.
- scott_to_s 5y ago
  The middle version really doesn't look worse. Perhaps you are just conditioned to read the US version and so your aesthetics have been changed by the familiarity with the US format?
optymizer 5y ago
I thought there was a generally accepted way of signaling that a quote is incomplete - by using [...]. For example: "[...] the first game was better, but not in a good way" There's no need to use the full stop inside the quote to show that the sentence had ended. That can be the default, because most time it doesn't matter, but in the cases where it is relevant to show that there's content after, then why not: "I thought the first game was better [...]"
jmull 5y ago
Eh, worrying much about this stuff is fairly pointless. It’s not like there’s a rules committee we can petition. I do use the British style when I can get away with it, but for anything formal or important I just suck it up and do it the way it’s supposed to be done. Anyway, if I could change rules of English, this wouldn’t be that high a priority.
codefoster 5y ago
Agreed. Unfortunately, I don't often see examples of a language evolving on suggestion - even reasonable suggestion.
chelonian 5y ago
I think the solution is to always add just a few more words at the end of a sentence: > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.” and then said no more.
- happymellon 5y ago
  But there you have just come to the same British conclusion that the end of the sentence is outside the quotation.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Except that a quotation that doesn't end the containing sentence isn't punctuated that way in either US or UK style; with the added text, it would be either: (UK) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, ‘I refute it thus’, and then said no more. or: (US) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus,” and then said no more.
teddyh 5y ago
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck. — http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html
- SllX 5y ago
  It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. If I could put the period below the quotation mark, then I would do so as I already do in writing.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    > It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. Æsthetic is misplaced pedantry, since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic
    - esquivalience 5y ago
      This is all sorts of meta.
      - yosito 5y ago
        *metæ
        mkaic 5y ago
        *mætæ
kbos87 5y ago
Im not someone with strong opinions on this sort of thing, but it has never made sense to me that I’d put a period inside quotation marks if it isn’t a part of the quote.
rossjudson 5y ago
Teach an elementary school kid yet another wrinkle in the English language around where they should punctuation marks? No thanks.
some_random 5y ago
I'm going to be entirely honest, this seems like a complete waste of time for everyone involved. The point of writing is to communicate, and I don't see how the position of punctuation in relation to quotation marks affects the understanding of the communication to the reader. Just pick one and stick with it.
vzaliva 5y ago
Learning English I found American quotation style very weird. It would be interesing to know if any nother language do something like this and where this traidition comes from. We certainly do not do this in russian and ukrainian I've learned in school.
plandis 5y ago
The article is written by a German who probably learned British English, so in effect this is some guy telling people they should write in the way OP learned to write? How did this make it to the front page of HN?
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I'm an American and was taught the British Style as correct US English. I didn't realize there were different styles - I just figured some folks got it wrong sometimes.
ahwvd37js 5y ago
It high school I got yelled at when I put the period before the final quote mark. In college I got yelled at when I did the opposite. Both seem completely arbitrary.
SerLava 5y ago
Call it "logical quotation" vs "typesetter's quotation". The American/British dividing line is extremely hazy, and only really cements the typesetter's quotations in the minds of Americans.
mcguire 5y ago
Don't expect natural language to logically "make sense". Just don't. It doesn't work by those rules, and trying to force it to do so just leads to seventeenth-century grammarian jackasses and Strunk and White.
kazinator 5y ago
Prefer the hackerly style of quotation punctuation: the period ends the sentence: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”. This is one big sentence which contains an embedded quote. The period ends that big sentence. The quote contains a complete sentence. Therefore, arguably, it deserves its own period. > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. So this matter revolves around the idea that we want only one period, and so the question is which of these two periods do we elide. I'm arguing that if we are going to elide, the one we should elide is the inner one, because it's of less importance. Eliding the outer one leaves the entire sentence unterminated, whereas the quote is obviously terminated by the closing quote. (What is the sentence period for? It's for indicating where sentences end, so that the reader doesn't get confused parsing the end of one sentence together with the start of the next one. A closing quote has a solid end indicator already.) If there are multiple quoted sentences, then those except the last preserve their terminating punctuator: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it? Ah, I refute it thus”. What if the quoted sentence ends in a terminator different from the one of the embedding clause? Then we cannot elide either one: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it?”. Except if the inner one is a period. We can establish the convention that a missing punctuator inside a quote is an implied period (if the quote is obviously a complete clause): > Did Dr. Johnson really say “I refute it thus”? Something like that. We should strive, in some halfway rational way, not to leave the overall sentence without terminating punctuation. (I do not agree that .". has a redundant period. Two different sentences are ending, using their own punctuation marks which are not related, and could potentially be different. I agree that it's ugly. Eliding the inner period is not the same as eliminating it; we are making it implied. Something implied is still semantically there, just not as a visible syntactic token.) Note that whatever." does not indicate the end of a sentence; it can plausibly continue: > Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus." and kicked the rock. As soon as we have additional words after the quote, we have two periods unless we elide one. In this case, we definitely must not elide the one after "rock". Whereas eliding the quoted one according to the hackerly style leaves a clean result: > Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus" and kicked the rock.
aaroninsf 5y ago
Orthography in specific and natural language in general (formalized and written, or otherwise) is not beholden to be "logical;" idiosyncratic deviance from established cultural norms looks adolescent in anything other than a private subculture. Specifically in American English, which unlike French French or German German, does not have a state-sanctioned standards body attempting (and often failing) to police or mandate its evolution. Earnest advice for those tempted to adopt "logical" style in American English language written communication: adhere to the standards. Relevant: https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20Sez%20Spel%20Az%20Yu%20Pleez https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20...
kevwil 5y ago
I am American and can't help but wonder if this is a subtle British joke. This is just poor grammar based on how I was taught, so perhaps some Brits think it's cheeky to call it "American Style", like an American calling a dull stick a "British toothbrush". If so, well played. If not, no harm done, just don't use "American Style".
- drivers99 5y ago
  Not a joke. I thought the article was going to be about using single quotes vs double quotes. This article mentions that difference as being a reason typographers would put the punctuation inside vs outside the (double) quotes. https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/ https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/
motohagiography 5y ago
I switch between the american style for persuasion, and the british style for precision. Am also Canadian, so a metanational approach is normal here. I also keep copies of the Chicago Manual and Strunk & White, which are useful for knowing which rules to break. Ain't never had much of a problem, consequently.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
It is classic HN that this is one of the most active posts of the week!
coryfklein 5y ago
OP: When in Rome, do as the Greeks do because their way is better.
- gerikson 5y ago
  The Romans held Greek culture in high regard. It was unthinkable for an educated man to not know Greek. And of course the "Greek" part of the Empire survived for a thousand years after the Western part petered out.
spleen 5y ago
Putting the period or comma within quotes (the US style) is like tucking your shirt in and then leaving a small part of it out.
7402 5y ago
Grownups don't worry about this stuff. Just like they don't worry about which programming language style guide to use. If you're writing for an American audience, use American style. If you're writing for a British audience, use British style. If you're writing a journal article, or for a business, use whatever style everyone else there uses. If you're writing for yourself, use what you like.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > Grownups don't worry about this stuff. Community guidelines[0]: - When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. - Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Insinuating that anyone who wishes to discuss this topic isn't a "grownup" seemingly violates two maybe three guidelines. Your comment without the first sentence would have been more constructive. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lenocinor 5y ago
Somewhat related — in my experience reading news articles online, it seems like more and more often I’m seeing the period migrate outside parentheses for full sentences. Has anyone else noticed this trend?
srachamim 5y ago
As a programmer I prefer to avoid the semicolon cancer, so I think best is to get rid of the final period. > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”
- Bhristovski 5y ago
  Btw for what it’s worth, Dr Johnson’s so-called refutation was a total failure. He only confirmed he had totally misunderstood what Berkeley was getting at.

612 points by erwald 5y ago

I got in a heated debate about this with a technical writing instructor. Namely, I was ending a question with a quote along the lines of > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all”? The instructor wanted me to put the question mark of the outer sentence within the quotation marks despite the quoted text not containing a question mark. > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all?” I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it felt like a misrepresentation. This being the “correct” way to do it has always irritated me. I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn’t end with the quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since.

eCa 5y ago
Yes, this is the reason why, IMHO, the American way is objectively wrong. Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder, but a quotation style that enforces incorrect quotations is not good.
- pteraspidomorph 5y ago
  It makes some sense if you consider it a representation of the way you'd speak/read the sentence. If you read that sentence out loud, regardless of where you put the question mark you'll have to intone the quote as if the quote was a question, due to its context. So it functions "better" as a reading hint. (Though I'd also prefer to have the punctuation outside the quote.)
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  It seems wrong because it is. > Question marks and exclamation points have their own rules. > If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/
  - eCa 5y ago
    I have seen things like: > The password is ’%>>~|]#^|,’ which is awesome. Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I don't think the normal rules of grammar are designed to handle this case. I would probably write something like > The password, which is awesome, is: > %>>~|]#^| This also has the benefit of putting the password on it's own line, which should make life easier for people actually consuming the document.
    - PennRobotics 5y ago
      There's nothing I like more than typing a URL at the end of a sentence and getting the punctuation wrapped up in the URL. /s
shannifin 5y ago
Unlike periods and commas, putting question marks and exclamation marks inside the quotation when they are not part of the quote is against AP, APA, Chicago, and MLA style specifications... Granted, I don't know if technical writing typically adheres to some other style, but shoving a question mark inside a quote it isn't part of is definitely not typical of American styles in general.
- lolinder 5y ago
  Correct, but that just shows why the American style is so confusing. That we have to have an exception for more meaningful punctuation marks just serves to confuse, and emphasizes just how bad the default is.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    I didn't even realize that periods were an exception. (as an American) I've always preserved the original quote for all three forms of punctuation, and put a sentence-ender only if there isn't one inside the quote. I'd bet most americans do the same, style guides be damned. IMO, it's also totally crazy to export a punctuation mark out of the quote always.
    - shannifin 5y ago
      True, you really only have to worry about it if you're writing or editing for a teacher or publisher who wants you to adhere to some specific style. The real annoying thing for me (as an American) was having different teachers teach different things in school. (Same with double spaces between sentences in typing and the oxford comma.) At least when the teacher used a style guide, there was a source of consistency I could turn to, even if I disagreed with them.
beckerdo 5y ago
This brings up a point related to the double-period/redundancy discussion above. In a slight adjustment of this example, what if the text were a question and the quotation were a statement. Would this be a good construct: Why did Jake believe "the AI was going to kill us all."? Similarly you could have a text statement with a quoted question: Jake asked "would the AI kill us all?".
- Xen0byte 5y ago
  Very good counter-argument to the non-sensical punctuation mark redundancy argument.
  - beckerdo 5y ago
    Also there are the possibilities for various questions and exclamations. Why did Jake ask "Can I have another biscuit?"? I was frightened when Jake shouted "Who are you?"! My trousers were soiled when Jake shouted "Boo!"! Why did I soil my trousers when Jake shouted "Boo!"?
dfxm12 5y ago
I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it felt like a misrepresentation... I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn’t end with the quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since. I appreciate the skill involved in avoiding ambiguity. The hard part is knowing the unknown unknowns, ya know? I read both sentences the same way and can't really fathom why someone else wouldn't! (Of course, I don't have the context of the original quote here, so maybe that comes into play... but I don't know, and probably shouldn't have to!)
Tsiklon 5y ago
I think you're right; > Why did Jake believe the AI was "going to kill us all?" This reads, to me, like Jake's quoted sentence was originally a question. If the original sentence was an assertion or a statement, then you're right this fundamentally changes the meaning and strength of Jake's sentence.
sebastialonso 5y ago
wow, your instructor is an idiot.

runeks 5y ago

As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.

bambax 5y ago
Strongly disagree. This is an abomination. Language and typography have to be elegant in addition to intelligible.
- reedf1 5y ago
  Would you sacrifice clarity for elegance?
  - ttctciyf 5y ago
    What clarity is sacrificed? Is it in doubt that the sentence ended? The single period favours both elegance and clarity over slavish and unimaginative punctiliousness.
  - bambax 5y ago
    Good question! Perhaps one of the most important questions regarding writing... I would argue clarity and elegance don't oppose one another; elegance means being as clear as possible without being clumsy or heavy handed, and without insulting your reader's intelligence. Said reader is not a machine, they're supposed to be fluent in the language. We should reduce ambiguity as much as possible, but no more than that. Adding signs where no ambiguity remains only worsens the signal to noise ratio.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Besides, if you look at it upside down, you might be tempted to invoke Godwin's Law.
- 5y ago

hibbelig 5y ago

I think the argument for the American style is aesthetics. I don't like it, but I can understand that there are people who prefer what looks better. TFA did not address this at all, which is a pity.

programmer_dude 5y ago
FWIW the British style looks more aesthetically pleasing to me. The American style reminds me of inappropriately mixed brackets: [(]). Cringe.
- blitzar 5y ago
  > for the American style is aesthetics Why would you make a style choice to make something less aesthetically pleasing?
  - programmer_dude 5y ago
    I wouldn't and I don't think I am. The American style is not aesthetically pleasing at all. I think you misread my comment or replied to me accidentally.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      I am in agreement with you - I didnt even know this so called american style existed untill now, it makes no sense at all.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Oddly, perhaps, I wish programming languages would allow or require mixed brackets when working with open- and/or closed-ended ranges.
mdp2021 5y ago
> the argument for the American style is aesthetics Absorption of set theory should make one cringe at 'Abc def. Ghi jkl. Mnop "qrs." Tuv...'. The quotation marks are logically included in the section beginning with 'M', then visually escape it.

gerikson 5y ago

The linked article correctly uses "British" to denote the style of punctuation, I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently.

erwald 5y ago
uhm, good point, fixed. that was just a mistake. edit: for the record, I wrote the article and also posted it here. so I figured I could take the liberty of changing the title when sharing here.
dgb23 5y ago
Also the article's title is more juicy. HN sometimes goes overboard with editing titles. I guess it is a matter of taste.
- gerikson 5y ago
  This is an interesting service to track this sort of thing: https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/
coldtea 5y ago
>I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently. Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English" is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and England for the UK), as those were the British they most commonly met.
- Veen 5y ago
  It's best not to though, unless you want to annoy people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most English people will consider it a sign of ignorance too. Beyond that, the "colloquial" use is simply incorrect.
  - 5y ago

trzeci 5y ago

Which makes no sense IMHO is to use “” instead of "". But it could be my OCD also.

Y_Y 5y ago
It's all fun and games until you try to copy the "66 and 99"-style quotes from one place to another, or your ”helpful“ text editor automagically makes a mess of them. It's a pity no good ``asymmetric'' style ever really took off in English. I'm particularly fond of the French «chevrons», and relatedly, ¡Spanish exclamations! ⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  I don't really like the dedicated interrobang character, because it loses the distinction between ?! and !?, which is probably rather subtle, but to my mind definitively there.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    I would argue that those two choices remain available to you, and that you can reach even finer levels of subtlety by using (or conspicuously not using) the interrobang. (Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)
  - joombaga 5y ago
    How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.
    - willhinsa 5y ago
      I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

po 5y ago

The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-quotes-with-periods-and-commas#369110 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typeset-a-quote-directly-above-a-period https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...

jeroenhd 5y ago
Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  As I recall, this historically was the standard. In handwriting, the ligature could be and was placed naturally. In professional printing with moveable type, the ligature could be included in the typeset. Only once typewriters were invented and couldn't spare a key for every ligature did the sequential style appear and the British and American styles diverge.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    This seems like it ought to be possible on a typewriter -- or at least, one with a true backspace. I'm not sure if the backspace was an advanced/late feature, though. It seems pretty simple, but mechanical parts are pretty fiddly I guess.
- Spivak 5y ago
  What ligature would you propose for "? or "!
  - 5y ago

bambax 5y ago

The reason this problem exists is because computers and font libraries don't have all the characters we need. The point or comma should be at the same place as the quotes, under them, not before or after.

coldtea 5y ago
>at the same place as the quotes, under them What?
- OJFord 5y ago
  See po's comment providing SE links for doing it in tex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536834
  - bambax 5y ago
    Ah, yes. Exactly that.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      OK, but why? Is this a convention?
      - bambax 5y ago
        It looks better and it saves space.
        coldtea 5y ago
        I'd argue the first is subjective (and I don't think it looks better personally). It's also different to how we use the same punctuation otherwise. It does save space, but I'd say that's neither here nor there. It isn't like space for an extra period at the end of a sentence was ever at a premium. At best, for a whole 200+ page book, you'd save a page or so.

coldtea 5y ago

100% agree.

virgilp 5y ago

Is this just a version of "Prefer tabs over spaces when writing code"? Because if so, I already know the outcome of this debate.

chromatin 5y ago
No, I think not, because the quotation marks imbue semantic meaning to what’s inside.

rom1v 5y ago

The first time I read a book in English, I thought the quotation mark after the dot was a typo/syntax error (it didn't parse correctly, and it made no sense to me). After so many instances of the exact same typo in the book, I thought the author/editor had a specific problem with ordering quotation marks and dots. It's only when I read another English book with the same "syntax error" that I realized that it was not a bug in English.

bencollier49 5y ago

For some reason, in school in Britain in the 1980s, we were taught rather religiously to always end anything inside speech marks with a comma. I'm not sure where this style comes from, but it confused me terribly and took me years to correct.

jsmith99 5y ago
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-quotation-in-a-comma https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/195902/ending-a-... suggests this is the style recommended by Oxford Dictionaries.

Tepix 5y ago

This is indeed annoying and illogical when learning english, especially because other languages get it right. The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Also very irritating.

rom1v 5y ago
> The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Precision: a non-breaking space (unicode U+00A0) :) LibreOffice or other word processing software automatically replace normal spaces by non-breaking spaces in that case. But in text editors (like vim), we must do it manually (Ctrl+Shift+ua0 on Linux), typically when writing a French text in markdown, it's a bit irritating indeed.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  This is usually configurable, e.g. Compose-Space-Space inserts a no-break space if the Compose key is set up, or AltGr+Space, Ctrl-Shift+Space etc. (KDE has a dialog for customizing this under Settings→Input Devices→Keyboard→Advanced, where there are an impressive 16 possible options. It is just options to setxkbmap underneath.)
BossHamster 5y ago
Not only is it irritating, it looks ugly as hell.
- bambax 5y ago
  It doesn't look ugly at all if the space is of the correct length.
dredmorbius 5y ago
That's typical of older English typography as well. Here in a book of classics printed in 1910: https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mo... And in David Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753): https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n16/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n...

simiones 5y ago

I think the example sentence contains the worst corner-case of such a system. In general, the . at the end of sentence is the least necessary punctuation mark, and quotations of neutral statements should just always omit it. For example, "this is how a neutral sentence should look like", I would say. I don't think "they saw a vase." looks good even in the middle of a sentence. However, "do I have a question?", or "I am exclaiming something!" do need their punctuation to make sense. Now, it's more ugly when you finish a neutral sentence a quote like "I am surprised!". Of course, there will be cases, especially in literature, where the . will actually add something to the emphasis of a quote. For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period.

CRConrad 5y ago
> For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period. Even there, doing it like you did and putting the quoted sentence in the middle, not at the end, of the outer one looks about a gazillion times better

ponco 5y ago

I genuinely love how American, Australian, and British, English all differ in these subtle ways. I think another example that gets me is: `e.g.` vs `e.g.,` MS Word favours the `e.g.,` which I never see in Australian English.

open-source-ux 5y ago
There are so many small differences between English language flavours, it's fascinating. Going off on a tangent, here's a random example... The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different. In the US: () = parentheses [] = brackets {} = braces (or curly braces) <> = angle brackets In the UK: () = brackets (or 'round brackets') [] = square brackets {} = curly brackets <> = angle brackets (or angled brackets) I prefer the UK version because it is simpler and feels logical. Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
- flurdy 5y ago
  Surely {} = squiggly brackets ?
  - Izkata 5y ago
    I work with UK and US people regularly, and despite not being an official name this is the only name for those characters that everyone has automatically understood.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    When writing code by hand I literally just draw mirrored squiggles. (On inspection, only the first stroke at the top reliably indicates direction.)
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Logically, yes, but "curly brackets" is the only term I have ever heard used for these types of brackets. In Canada, which tends to use a lot of UK-isms.
- 5y ago

ddek 5y ago

Interesting. I've always used the 'British Style', but in a mid-90s junior school in Scotland I was taught to always end quotations with punctuation. I guess I just rebelled.

rozab 5y ago

I was typing out an explanation/justification to the effect that when speaking aloud, the punctuation at the end of the sentence is 'heard' in the last word, even if the word is quoted. We insert a pause before the start of the quote to indicate it was direct, but there isn't a way of indicating whether, say, a question mark belongs inside or outside the quotation. But then I sounded out some examples in my head and realised it would be totally obvious. The inflection of the question is apparent from the beginning of the fragment (¿), not just from the inflection on the last word. I knew this already, of course, but I didn't really grok it, I guess because of the limitations of how we write out punctuation in English.

john-aj 5y ago
Also, aren't questions marked primarily by word order rather than intonation in English?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  There are several kinds of questions. The intonation that people think of as characterizing questions is actually specific to yes/no questions. It can be the only feature that marks the sentence as interrogative: "You know him?" is a valid sentence, and it is distinct from the indicative "You know him." There are also what I think of as "question word" questions, and you might think of as "fill in the blank" questions: "Why are you here?" These do not necessarily have the intonation that applies to yes/no questions. Like yes/no questions, they are characterized by subject-auxiliary inversion (the word order constraint you mention), and also like yes/no questions, that inversion is not guaranteed to be present in a question of this type: "Who sent you?" (Note that inversion is possible for "You know him?" ("Do you know him?") and impossible for "Who sent you?"; these are different phenomena.) I would argue that the yes/no question is primarily marked by intonation and the question-word question is primarily marked by the presence of a question word. Word order is affected in both cases, but not the primary indicator of what's going on. (Compare "He said what to the king?" - again, inversion is possible here ("What did he say to the king?"), but not required. In this case, the inverted version of the question is unmarked (normal), and the uninverted version suggests that the speaker wishes to place a special emphasis on something.)

brianmcc 5y ago

Lovely, the grammatical equivalent of where we put our braces, same-line vs new-line :-)

CRConrad 5y ago
Fifty-fifty: Opening same, closing new. I'll die on this hill!

ur-whale 5y ago

About as good as I can think of a perfect example of a first world problem.

jack_riminton 5y ago

I also prefer the common British use of commas over the oxford comma

qwerty456127 5y ago

What is described as the American style seems weird and never came into my mind. If I would ever stumble upon such a style I would think it's a typo.

macdice 5y ago

Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and you see the contrast. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadians go both ways at random ;-)

dredmorbius 5y ago
cOnsider tHe pOssible cOmpromises aVailable tO tHe eNterprising lAnguage sTylist!
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
It's less logical even than that. It's almost every word. On the NYT homepage right now, for example, one story is "Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Block Texas From Enforcing Abortion Law". So "From" is capitalised but "to" isn't. Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple Issues Emergency Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw".
- nkozyra 5y ago
  I'm surprised by this, as the Times has a fairly well-followed style book. I'd be curious if this pattern followed in print or if things are just more lax online. edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content generated online has a looser pattern than the articles generated for this morning's paper.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.
  - BostonFern 5y ago
    It's called title case, and it's not determined by the length of a word but by whether or not a word is minor. The rules defining minor words vary slightly between styles, but they're usually prepositions and articles.

user-the-name 5y ago

The only reason the "American style" exists is a technical workaround: It was easier to damage the expensive lead type used in print shops a century ago if the thin period character was used on the end of the line, rather than the thicker, sturdier quotation mark, so they were swapped as a cost-saving measure. None of this has been relevant for many decades, and people have forgotten the reason for this rule. It was never correct to do, it was a choice to do it the wrong way around out of convenience.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Source?
anandoza 5y ago
What about sentences that end in a period without a quote? That seems like it'd be much more common.

xfz 5y ago

I think they messed up; the first sentences of each of the first two examples are identical apart from the reference. > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[1] and > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[3] Second one should be: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.[3]

bumblebritches5 5y ago

You mean using apostrophes as quotes? gross

shannifin 5y ago

Agree with the post; interestingly, in grade school (here in America) I was actually taught both ways depending on the teacher's preference / belief (assuming we were not writing MLA research papers)... this mostly led to perpetual confusion, so we'd often just put the period directly under the quotation. (Of course, couldn't do that for typed assignments.) I remember one of my English teachers accepting both ways because she could never keep it straight herself.

codingdave 5y ago

> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. Why not? We have different vocabulary, different spelling. Our accents are sufficiently different that non-native speakers can't always understand both. So serious question - why wouldn't punctuation also differ?

somishere 5y ago

Logical aspirations aside, punctuation is largely meant to aid in reading. While some marks provide emphasis, most (other than suggesting connectivity) denote a length of pause. Punctuation (or lack thereof) that pulls you out of the flow of the reading is, IMHO, really not in the spirit of things ;)

est 5y ago

The American style is like putting closing bracket at the wrong indentation.

Loic 5y ago

My first association: https://xkcd.com/541/ https://xkcd.com/541/ This is very emotional because we start when being 6 and as such, for many years, you are exposed to only one way to quote or put spaces around punctuation. I am French, living in Germany and working in English 50% of the time. It is interesting that it is only after maybe 15 years outside of France that now my feeling for what is the right way in one language matches the rules. For example: - How do you do? - Comment allez-vous ? Notice the space before the question mark in French. For me, now, it feels right for both, for a long time this was not the case.

Tainnor 5y ago

> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. That's the typical answer a programmer would give. A linguist, or really any kind of sociologist, would rather say: > There is no reason that there should be a single approach to punctuation in the English language.

sbuk 5y ago

Politics and the English Language[0] has this covered, though not directly referencing punctuation; "vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous". [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Y_Y 5y ago
If one is going to look to an authority in English, I think there's none better than Orwell. There are those of the opinion, however, that with regard to "outright barbary" the ship has long since sailed.
chromatin 5y ago
Hear, hear. An under appreciated long-form essay that I refer colleagues to frequently.

kdeldycke 5y ago

I tried to implement some linting rules for quotation mark and punctuation once. Took me way too much time and effort. It's mostly trial and error but good enough I guess to highlight the most blatant abuses. Anyway, here is the code: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files

antattack 5y ago

US style is 'wrong' because it requires one to modify the original quote by adding punctuation within the quotes which delineate the quotation.

wombatmobile 5y ago

I didn’t know these different styles were actual idioms, or that one is “American” and the other “British”. I’ve just always been unsure. Now I’ve learned through this discussion that there is no definitive way, I feel freer to play it by ear and write what feels right at the time.

aardvark179 5y ago

I’m not aware of the punctuation mark going outside the quotation being, “British style,” and I’m struggling to find other references to it being so. It’s certainly not what is done in most British typography. Putting the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks has been a thing ever since printing, and I always thought it was done to avoid have an isolated full stop on a printing plate, which could be damaged relatively easily., but this may be a retroactive justification.

MisterTea 5y ago

> In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks American here. I never put periods in the quotes unless the text within the quotes is a full sentence. I also had no idea there was an American or British style regarding quotes.

andrew_ 5y ago
American here. Placing punctuation in a quote ending a sentence is how English Composition was taught to me in grade school and in college. I took to Eng Comp early on and had at least one class in the subject from 9th grade in 1993 through my final year of college in 2003. IMHO this is right up there with tabs vs spaces. People are going to have very different takes on what looks aesthetically pleasing based on viewing repetition and training. There is no right answer, since both are widely accepted, only personal preference.
- derbOac 5y ago
  FWIW, as another anecdatum from an American, I was always taught the "British style" was the correct way, and the "American style" was incorrect. They were never referred to as "British" or "American" though, just "correct" and "incorrect". I prefer the "British" style, FWIW. Maybe it's just what I was taught, but I have encountered arguments for the other way periodically (causing me to have to check), and I always preferred the way I learned for the reasons in the article.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    the "british" style also introduces an ambiguity. Did the original quote contain the puncutation, or does it derive from the outside context? It's pretty clear to me that the correct method (on the grounds of respecting source material) is: "punctuation inside, if it comes from the source, punctuation outside if it's from the outside context". And there are times when quotes aren't even direct quotes, they could be scare quotes. Why the hell would you ever put punctuation inside of a scare quote? I don't think any american would do this. E.g.: Dough is pronounced like "doe." -- TERRIBLE. Stab my eyes out. Dough is pronounced like "doe". -- sensible.

insickness 5y ago

If you were surprised that someone calmly said, "I can't do that," how would you write it? This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do that!" This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"! This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!

ycombinete 5y ago
The middle one looks the best. I think the simple answer would be to convey it with words instead of an explanation point.

daviddever23box 5y ago

I grew up in the United States and was taught that which is referred to here as the “British style”; not sure where this notion of an “American style” originated.

transfire 5y ago

I imagine it depends on what you are trying to say... He said, "Will you?" I said, "No!" He said, "Will you"? I said, "No"! He said, "Will you?". I said, "No!". He said, "Will you?"!? I said, "No!" ;)

ctrlp 5y ago

This makes sense to me and looks good. Some other quote style ideas: - use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote; use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy'). - use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-fingered air-quotes look ridiculous). - use double quotes around single quotes when nesting quotes. Avoid nesting more than one level of quotes.

CRConrad 5y ago
These are not so much "ideas" as already-common practice, aren't they?
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  UK English uses single quote marks by default, falling back to double quote marks for nesting.
bhandziuk 5y ago
What's the difference between scare quotes and a short catch phrase?
- ctrlp 5y ago
  Scare quotes are emotion/sense markers. They suggest irony, sarcasm, "skepticism", etc... A short phrase is just a short phrase.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

afranchuk 5y ago

I was taught the American way (as I live in the US), but immediately rejected it (even at a young age) and did it the British way, though I had no idea that's what it was called. Besides the week or so when teachers were covering that in their syllabus, nobody ever complained or noted it at all :)

anf0 5y ago

Does anyone have any thoughts on date formats? E.g. d/m/y vs. m/d/y?

red_trumpet 5y ago
Just use d/m/y as the rest of the world.
- riffic 5y ago
  no: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601
posedge 5y ago
The only true format is the programmer's yyyy-mm-dd :)
Akronymus 5y ago
8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 which can be any of these: YYYY-MM-DD YYYY-MM YYYYMMDD
- aendruk 5y ago
  ISO 8601 is proprietary and people can’t even read it without each paying a $170 access fee. Instead, prefer IETF RFC 3339 (mentioned in your link) which is a more practical open standard.
dcminter 5y ago
In prose, use month names (i.e. 1st Jan 1979, or Jan 1st 1970). Where numbers must be used for some reason use four-digit-year first if you can. If you can't use the dictated standard or, if there isn't one (raising the obvious question of why that would be), go with the form that will be familiar to most of your readers. In other words, as with all things, prefer unambiguous forms but consider and respect your audience.
jgwil2 5y ago

jameshart 5y ago

I think, given that this is just some guy’s opinion (it’s not like this is someone who has a job as a professional copyeditor or publisher of a respected style guide), the only real takeaway most people should take from this is: There are various conventions you can adopt around quoted punctuation You, as an individual writer of English prose, have the option of adopting a style you prefer It’s okay for reasonable people to disagree about that

BugWatch 5y ago
Basically, all interpunction characters have started as "some guy's opinion". All graphemes for the characters, too. I know the "rules", but I've been also intentionally writing it in what I refer to as "functional style", e.g.: """ Greg's reaction was "But what of the otters?!". Mary's "Nobody cares about otters!" was received with a stunned shock. Joseph calmly said "I'm ambivalent.". But Ophelia just "didn't care". After hearing about the whole ordeal, Mary's brother was livid: "«Nobody cares about otters!»?! She's a bloody otterologist!"... and then he visibly shook, and his face blanked as he slowly collapsed into his armchair, looking broken, repeatingly mumbling to himself "Illogical... illogical...". """ First three are verbatim restated statements; fourth is a partial and/or summary statement (no quoted punctuation); fifth is a very complex example (and a long [but fully functional!] sentence. We also need light-, mid-, heavy-strength commas. :p

fortran77 5y ago

No. I will use a Nations’s preferred punctuation. To do otherwise is rude and inconsiderate.

CRConrad 5y ago
So, which nation ("Nations’s"?!?) did you write that for? Do you know where I -- and all the rest of us who saw it -- are sitting as we read it?

codeofdusk 5y ago

This style of punctuation is "logical quotation", not necessarily British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toby- 5y ago
This is true. You can find the 'American style' in the UK occasionally, especially in fiction – it's not exceptionally rare. But regardless, the styles have come to be known as 'American' and 'British' because they generally are preferred in American and British English respectively, even if it's not absolute: Americans tend to be taught US style, and Brits tend to be taught British style.

cool-RR 5y ago

> There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language. If you want to go that route, there's no reason for there to be more than one language on Earth. Any attempt to research linguistics should respect the fact that people want to be different from each other, and see that as a valid reason.

amelius 5y ago

Sorry, but I prefer less rules over more rules unless they provide some tangible benefit. This is just rules for the sake of rules.

dctoedt 5y ago
> I prefer less rules over more rules As you illustrate by saying "less rules" instead of "fewer rules." (I agree with you: For any language, the less that non-native speakers have to worry about tripping over some finicky rule, the better.)

mmmBacon 5y ago

The American version is often a simplification of the British version. I also find the American version to be more readable. Simpler, easier to use syntax seems preferable to me over verbose style.

rplst8 5y ago

I found this out years ago, and adopted the British style. It makes way more sense and reads better. I'll also put in my two cents here about spaces after a period. I always use two spaces after a sentence and one after an abbreviation. If you only ever use one, there is too much ambiguity around sentences that end with an abbreviation.

BugWatch 5y ago
I'd just repeat the dot/full-stop, since I'm of the "opinion" that the functionality should take precedent over looks. Also, I think I will be adopting the double spacing after a sentence.

dhosek 5y ago

The British style works best with the Penguin style of using single quotes for the outer level of quotation rather than double quotes. Part of the reason we write “this.” is for esthetics. Compare: “this.” “this”. ‘this’. The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or last.

optymizer 5y ago
What makes it _objectively_ worse? Subjectively, I think it looks better than the first one and as good as the last one.
- dhosek 5y ago
  The period gets pushed out into isolation by the quotation marks. In Verdana, which is the default font for text on HN, ” is fairly narrow, but for other typefaces, the effect is quite dramatic.
scott_to_s 5y ago
The middle version really doesn't look worse. Perhaps you are just conditioned to read the US version and so your aesthetics have been changed by the familiarity with the US format?

optymizer 5y ago

I thought there was a generally accepted way of signaling that a quote is incomplete - by using [...]. For example: "[...] the first game was better, but not in a good way" There's no need to use the full stop inside the quote to show that the sentence had ended. That can be the default, because most time it doesn't matter, but in the cases where it is relevant to show that there's content after, then why not: "I thought the first game was better [...]"

jmull 5y ago

Eh, worrying much about this stuff is fairly pointless. It’s not like there’s a rules committee we can petition. I do use the British style when I can get away with it, but for anything formal or important I just suck it up and do it the way it’s supposed to be done. Anyway, if I could change rules of English, this wouldn’t be that high a priority.

codefoster 5y ago

Agreed. Unfortunately, I don't often see examples of a language evolving on suggestion - even reasonable suggestion.

chelonian 5y ago

I think the solution is to always add just a few more words at the end of a sentence: > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.” and then said no more.

happymellon 5y ago
But there you have just come to the same British conclusion that the end of the sentence is outside the quotation.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Except that a quotation that doesn't end the containing sentence isn't punctuated that way in either US or UK style; with the added text, it would be either: (UK) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, ‘I refute it thus’, and then said no more. or: (US) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus,” and then said no more.

teddyh 5y ago

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck. — http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html

SllX 5y ago
It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. If I could put the period below the quotation mark, then I would do so as I already do in writing.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  > It’s an æsthetic choice in the end. Æsthetic is misplaced pedantry, since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aesthetic
  - esquivalience 5y ago
    This is all sorts of meta.
    - yosito 5y ago
      *metæ
      - mkaic 5y ago
        *mætæ

kbos87 5y ago

Im not someone with strong opinions on this sort of thing, but it has never made sense to me that I’d put a period inside quotation marks if it isn’t a part of the quote.

rossjudson 5y ago

Teach an elementary school kid yet another wrinkle in the English language around where they should punctuation marks? No thanks.

some_random 5y ago

I'm going to be entirely honest, this seems like a complete waste of time for everyone involved. The point of writing is to communicate, and I don't see how the position of punctuation in relation to quotation marks affects the understanding of the communication to the reader. Just pick one and stick with it.

vzaliva 5y ago

Learning English I found American quotation style very weird. It would be interesing to know if any nother language do something like this and where this traidition comes from. We certainly do not do this in russian and ukrainian I've learned in school.

plandis 5y ago

The article is written by a German who probably learned British English, so in effect this is some guy telling people they should write in the way OP learned to write? How did this make it to the front page of HN?

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

I'm an American and was taught the British Style as correct US English. I didn't realize there were different styles - I just figured some folks got it wrong sometimes.

ahwvd37js 5y ago

It high school I got yelled at when I put the period before the final quote mark. In college I got yelled at when I did the opposite. Both seem completely arbitrary.

SerLava 5y ago

Call it "logical quotation" vs "typesetter's quotation". The American/British dividing line is extremely hazy, and only really cements the typesetter's quotations in the minds of Americans.

mcguire 5y ago

Don't expect natural language to logically "make sense". Just don't. It doesn't work by those rules, and trying to force it to do so just leads to seventeenth-century grammarian jackasses and Strunk and White.

kazinator 5y ago

Prefer the hackerly style of quotation punctuation: the period ends the sentence: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”. This is one big sentence which contains an embedded quote. The period ends that big sentence. The quote contains a complete sentence. Therefore, arguably, it deserves its own period. > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. So this matter revolves around the idea that we want only one period, and so the question is which of these two periods do we elide. I'm arguing that if we are going to elide, the one we should elide is the inner one, because it's of less importance. Eliding the outer one leaves the entire sentence unterminated, whereas the quote is obviously terminated by the closing quote. (What is the sentence period for? It's for indicating where sentences end, so that the reader doesn't get confused parsing the end of one sentence together with the start of the next one. A closing quote has a solid end indicator already.) If there are multiple quoted sentences, then those except the last preserve their terminating punctuator: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it? Ah, I refute it thus”. What if the quoted sentence ends in a terminator different from the one of the embedding clause? Then we cannot elide either one: > Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it?”. Except if the inner one is a period. We can establish the convention that a missing punctuator inside a quote is an implied period (if the quote is obviously a complete clause): > Did Dr. Johnson really say “I refute it thus”? Something like that. We should strive, in some halfway rational way, not to leave the overall sentence without terminating punctuation. (I do not agree that .". has a redundant period. Two different sentences are ending, using their own punctuation marks which are not related, and could potentially be different. I agree that it's ugly. Eliding the inner period is not the same as eliminating it; we are making it implied. Something implied is still semantically there, just not as a visible syntactic token.) Note that whatever." does not indicate the end of a sentence; it can plausibly continue: > Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus." and kicked the rock. As soon as we have additional words after the quote, we have two periods unless we elide one. In this case, we definitely must not elide the one after "rock". Whereas eliding the quoted one according to the hackerly style leaves a clean result: > Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus" and kicked the rock.

aaroninsf 5y ago

Orthography in specific and natural language in general (formalized and written, or otherwise) is not beholden to be "logical;" idiosyncratic deviance from established cultural norms looks adolescent in anything other than a private subculture. Specifically in American English, which unlike French French or German German, does not have a state-sanctioned standards body attempting (and often failing) to police or mandate its evolution. Earnest advice for those tempted to adopt "logical" style in American English language written communication: adhere to the standards. Relevant: https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20Sez%20Spel%20Az%20Yu%20Pleez https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20...

kevwil 5y ago

I am American and can't help but wonder if this is a subtle British joke. This is just poor grammar based on how I was taught, so perhaps some Brits think it's cheeky to call it "American Style", like an American calling a dull stick a "British toothbrush". If so, well played. If not, no harm done, just don't use "American Style".

drivers99 5y ago
Not a joke. I thought the article was going to be about using single quotes vs double quotes. This article mentions that difference as being a reason typographers would put the punctuation inside vs outside the (double) quotes. https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/ https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/

motohagiography 5y ago

I switch between the american style for persuasion, and the british style for precision. Am also Canadian, so a metanational approach is normal here. I also keep copies of the Chicago Manual and Strunk & White, which are useful for knowing which rules to break. Ain't never had much of a problem, consequently.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

It is classic HN that this is one of the most active posts of the week!

coryfklein 5y ago

OP: When in Rome, do as the Greeks do because their way is better.

gerikson 5y ago
The Romans held Greek culture in high regard. It was unthinkable for an educated man to not know Greek. And of course the "Greek" part of the Empire survived for a thousand years after the Western part petered out.

spleen 5y ago

Putting the period or comma within quotes (the US style) is like tucking your shirt in and then leaving a small part of it out.

7402 5y ago

Grownups don't worry about this stuff. Just like they don't worry about which programming language style guide to use. If you're writing for an American audience, use American style. If you're writing for a British audience, use British style. If you're writing a journal article, or for a business, use whatever style everyone else there uses. If you're writing for yourself, use what you like.

Someone1234 5y ago
> Grownups don't worry about this stuff. Community guidelines[0]: - When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. - Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Insinuating that anyone who wishes to discuss this topic isn't a "grownup" seemingly violates two maybe three guidelines. Your comment without the first sentence would have been more constructive. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lenocinor 5y ago

Somewhat related — in my experience reading news articles online, it seems like more and more often I’m seeing the period migrate outside parentheses for full sentences. Has anyone else noticed this trend?

srachamim 5y ago

As a programmer I prefer to avoid the semicolon cancer, so I think best is to get rid of the final period. > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”

Bhristovski 5y ago
Btw for what it’s worth, Dr Johnson’s so-called refutation was a total failure. He only confirmed he had totally misunderstood what Berkeley was getting at.