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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 wei
by 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 agoStrongly disagree. This is an abomination. Language and typography have to be elegant in addition to intelligible.
- reedf1 5y agoWould you sacrifice clarity for elegance?
- ttctciyf 5y agoWhat 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 agoGood 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 agoBesides, if you look at it upside down, you might be tempted to invoke Godwin's Law.
- dspillett 5y agoThey don't have to be. They should be where-ever possible without affecting meaning or legibility.
- jjgreen 5y ago.". does look rather like a hairy Kilroy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
- Y_Y 5y agoI bet we'll see a "hairy Kilroy" operator in the next Haskell library for meromorphic lens co-combinators.
- thewakalix 5y agoUnfortunately, the quotation mark is not a valid operator character.
- programmer_dude 5y agoI feel the period inside quotes is redundant. The last quotation mark can signal both: end of quote and end of sentence within the quote. Though it gets complicated when there are multiple sentences within the quote. > Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus. I refute it thus”. This looks "unbalanced" to me.
- erwald 5y agoyep, I do mention this approach in a footnote, though it looks kinda awkward to me. maybe just because I’m not used to it. it’s definitely not necessary for reading aloud, where it’s enough to know that there’s a punctuation there. but when reading silently it does make more sense.
- Y_Y 5y agoI strongly agree. While we're on the topic, all the journals I'm familiar with require punctuation like full stops (aka periods) to be included in displaystyle maths expressions. There is a some logical justification for this, but it looks awful, and can be downright confusing depending on the sort of notation employed. It particularly irks me to see a spare comma tagged on to the end of a tensor calculus expression, that's supposed to be understood in the context of the surrounding prose, rather than the adjecant mathematical expression.
- dgb23 5y agoFootnote from the article: > More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly. I agree with you in principle, but aesthetics matter!
- rekoil 5y agoThis is how I always do it. I don't care what other people think, this is the only thing that makes sense if you ask me.
- bloak 5y ago> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me. I would suggest one of the following: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”. You've chosen not to quote the full stop. There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right? Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.” This also works if the quoted sentence ends with a question or exclamation mark. It's a shame that punctuation of human languages can't be logical, but it seems that we're stuck with inconsistent requirements and messy compromises. Cases like the following really confuse and annoy me: “On the other hand[,]”[,] she said, “we could wait till dark[.]”[.] (Should that depend on whether the original spoken sentence would, if written, contain a comma after "hand"?)
- KronisLV 5y ago> There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right? Oh, if only languages worked so consistently. DESCRIPTION_OF_WHAT_WAS_SAID: "$(DIRECT_QUOTE.)". Then again, in programming things don't always nest either, since sub shell calls have all sorts of oddities in regards to escape sequences. Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure.
- maybeOneDay 5y ago> Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure. JSON?
- KronisLV 5y agoNot quite, in practice you still occasionally stumble upon situations like these: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-properly-escape-double-quotes-in-strings-nested-in-a-json-object-locate https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-proper... Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-and-results https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...
- odiroot 5y agoI wrote my whole master thesis as you describe. It was logical to me. Then my promotor complained that it's not correct so I had to go through whole 100+ pages to correct all the instances.
- enriquto 5y agowhy? can't it be solved by a sed script with less than ten characters?
- canadianfella 5y agoWhy don’t you write that script for us.
- soheil 5y ago/\."\./, /\."/
- donatj 5y agoI would vote omit the punctuation from the original quote unless it adds something of particular value, which that period doesn’t seem to?
- TedShiller 5y agolol
- Veen 5y agoA footnote in the article addresses this: "More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly." I tend to agree with the author. While it's logically consistent, it's typographically redundant. There's no need to end a sentence with a full stop, a quotation mark, another full stop, and then a space, before beginning the next sentence with a capital letter.
- dandare 5y agoRedundant and ugly are very subjective qualities in this case.
- fauigerzigerk 5y agoI don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.
- OskarS 5y agoThis is the kind of thing that really annoy programmers (because in programming languages, you can never omit things like this), but everyone else is perfectly fine with. As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
- ivan_gammel 5y agoIn fact in some programming languages you can (or should) omit things like this. E.g. pascal does not require or explicitly forbids semicolon before end keyword.
- int_19h 5y agoPascal is fully self-consistent here: in it, semicolon is a statement separator, not a statement terminator. Since the statement before "end" is the last one in the block, there's no statement to separate it from with a trailing semicolon, and so it's a syntax error.
- nxpnsv 5y agoI logged in to write that it should be like this. Until the world changes, I use the British approach unless someone complains too much.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThis always made more sence. I used to love to write. That all ended in college, with English Instructors. I wasen't the only student either. There was so much emphasis on grammar, interesting writers just seemed to sound all alike. I enjoyed some of the papers that were read aloud the first few weeks. By the end of the courses, the papers were technically correct, but boring, and lacked imagination. I could see the enthusiasm drain from the students faces with every paper covered in red Sharpie corrections. I had one teacher that used to down grade me for not writing out numbers 1-10, and only using numbers for 11 on. I still don't know what's right, or care anymore. (I believe S & W recommends writing out 1-10.)
- felipellrocha 5y agoFinally someone who agrees with me. Don’t want the double punctuation? Write a simpler sentence.
- dspillett 5y agoSame. It is like matching brackets. Two sentence ends, one quoted and one quoting, so two full-stops. And like putting exclamation/question/interrobang/other marks in the right place depending on who is using them (quoter, quotee, or both). Of course you can shorten your quote by one character and leave out the inner stop, and I'd say that was equally valid. I would tend to do that unless I want to make it absolutely clear that what I was quoting wasn't a run-on sentence that continued after that point.
- psychoslave 5y agoJust don't put a ended sentence at the end of something that is not yet a finished utterance. It's always possible to make a full sentence quotation after a colon, possibly using indentation: With just enough of learning to misquote. — Lord Byron This can be even more explicit: “One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote.” — Alexander Pope Or you can also opt for inner quotation lightly altering the typography, like “quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author”, which is actually an excerpt from the wider quotation: “Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent and power.” — Anonymous
- Aeolun 5y agoI like the consistency of always having my punctuation inside quotes if a quote is there. Having to make the extra decision on whether the punctuation should be in, or outside the quote is too much to think about.
- SimeVidas 5y agoShe asked, “Did you find this on Yahoo!?”.
- CarVac 5y agoSomeone I know made a font modified so that the quotation mark goes directly over the period, which is a better way to combine the two.
- ycombinete 5y ago.”. This looks completely bizarre to me. I hope this never becomes a standard.
- Xen0byte 5y agoExactly, both approaches in the article are wrong, and this is the only way to write the sentence correctly. Each sentence needs to end in a punctuation mark, regardless of whether it's between quotes or not.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoWhenever I ask my English teacher wife about this sort of thing she reminds me that punctuation is rhetorical. If it's important to the writer that what is quoted be identified as a sentence then I agree with you, and I'm going to start using that construction in my writing. But when it comes to quoting words people say, is often good enough to just quote the words. When you store a command in a string, to you include the trailing newline? I usually don't, but it'll always depend on the use case.
- mdpm 5y agothink of it as a self-closing element. Like <br/> became <br>.
- mlindner 5y agoThat's how I already write messages. People can complain if they like.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. It doesn't. The end quote with a period inside it ends the sentence. > I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences There aren't. English doesn't nest or overlap sentences. Ever. Therr are plenty of ways in which English combines multiple units which each could otherwise be their own sentences into more complex sentences, but none of them involve having something which remains a sentence inside a longer sentence.
- a9h74j 5y agoNot even parenthetical remarks with opening and closing parentheses or mdashes? I won't say it isn't so (that would be redundant), but this example makes my point again.
- soheil 5y ago> The end quote with a period inside it ends the sentence. What a weird interpretation. Two characters shouldn't be needed to end a sentence, only a period can end a sentence. It'd be a lot easier to postulate the period inside ends the sentence and the quotation mark ends the quote that just ran outside the end of the sentence by one character.
- leephillips 5y agoAs a programmer surely the concept of syntactic sugar is not unfamiliar to you.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThis is what I do as well. The article says it's "redundant and ugly" but I don't think it's redundant at all--it's unambiguous that "I refute it thus." is a full sentence quote that happens to come at the end of a sentence. It's consistent and simple, as opposed to a special rule that says you can elide the outer `.` if (1) the quote ends in a `.` and (2) the quote is the final element of a sentence.
- kevinmgranger 5y agoIt sounds like we need a ligature that puts the quotation mark directly over the punctuation.
- baktubi 5y agoHmm. This feels a bit wrong to me. Double period makes longer pause, and wedged between a quote it doesn’t flow well: .”. Feels like a visual stutter. Either .” or “. are more final and visually stable. I’d argue depending on whether the pause affected by the period is important to the quote itself, put it in the quote. Then again, a block-quotation is probably more suitable for that scenario. Personally, for basic quotes in prose I’d put the period on the outside of quote because that directs readers to pause after the quote ends, not before.
- xdennis 5y agoIf it's like coding styles, almost anything to do with style is a matter of how much you're used to it. If .”. was the norm you might not find it so stylistically wrong. But .” is always syntactically wrong when then quoted text didn't have a full stop in it, and ”. is ambiguous about whether it's a complete sentence or not.
- floatingatoll 5y agoHow is the period in the quoted section relevant to the reader, in light of the close quote character terminating the sentence and quote both?
- jimbob45 5y agoYep, I agree and I do this too. Even in school I was willing to eat the docked points for doing it this way.
- lostgame 5y agoThis rubs me wrong in all the ways and is aesthetically jarring as all hell to me. If I’m reading a book or essay and I come across this type of punctuation, it actually actively removes me from my flow of reading and causes me to stop for a moment and lose immersion - same with obvious spelling and grammatical errors. It’s amazing how dependent our reading immersion is on proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.
- robocat 5y ago> aesthetically I prefer to think it is what you are accustomed to, or habituated to. From these comments a number of people including me, prefer to use the .”. form because we find that more aesthetically pleasing. I had discovered the .”. form myself because I play with my punctuation (and words and grammar), and until this discussion I hadn’t noticed others use .”.*. I presume other other programmers play with syntax and punctuation too. * Note I have italicised .”. and if you zoom on an iPad the full stops [US periods] change from squares to rhombusы.
- soheil 5y agoNo, because you will still need to apply a special case to stop the recursion of putting a period after a period forever. If a sentence ends in a period then what ends the expression that contains the sentence and the period? Answer: another period because you can think of that expression as a sentence too. So you need a special case that says if there are going to be two periods next to each other then terminate the recursion. Similarly your .". asinine suggestion fails since it implicitly invokes a special rule, but is worse than the elegant special rule of just having one period.
- DonHopkins 5y agoYes, that's better and more logical, because it also handles the case where the final punctuation of the outer sentence and quoted sentence is different, like when Dr. Johnson asked "I refute it thus?"!
- lalaithion 5y agoTechnically, "I refute it thus" and "I refute it thus." are both valid quotations of a source that contains, in its entirety, "I refute it thus."
- recursive 5y agoIs "rig" a valid quotation of "dirigibility"? Is "go there" a valid quotation of "never go there"?
- lalaithion 5y agoYes, and yes. But come on – should a punctuation style guide prevent misleading quotations? Can a punctuation style guide even do so?
- tradertef 5y agoSame here. This is the way.