"As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions."<p>These were always the worst type of teachers. When the majority of students are telling you and insisting that you are wrong, you are most likely wrong. This is especially true when they are able to provide a justification for their answer.<p>When a quote is used it is my firm belief that what goes inside the quotes should be a literal copy of whatever you are quoting. A full stop or a comma can in some cases modify the meaning of the quote and should not go inside the quotes because it makes the meaning of the quote ambiguous. For example if I used the above quote at the end of a sentence it would be unclear if the quote itself contained the period or if the period was just there to close my sentence.<p>Grammar has changed significantly over time and will continue to change. The argument that "that's the way we do it" doesn't hold water in my mind. It was a poor way of doing things to begin with so we should change.<p></rant>
The author admits that "logical punctuation" is an equally valid form, and can even point to publications for which it is the house style. So why is he taking points away from his students when they use it? It strikes me as a rather petty way of enforcing a particular stylistic choice where it doesn't really matter.
I never liked the idea of <i>changing the content of a quote</i> for any reason.<p>Let's say I go on the record saying something like this:<p>> Code reviews are worthless when it comes to those nasty little runtime corner cases that crop up now and again.<p>I sure as hell wouldn't want you writing the following:<p>> Mr. So-and-so was quoted today as saying "Code reviews are worthless."<p>Punctuation isn't just there for decoration. It has meaning. Injecting full stops into quotes in places they don't actually exist not only doesn't make any logical sense, it can actually change the meaning of the quote in very significant ways.
Oh wow, the American-style has always just <i>felt wrong</i> to me and I've just chosen to ignore it in my personal writing, for most of the reasons stated in the article. But I've had to write it professionally, as a reporter, because of the Associated Press style guide [1].<p>Good to know there's an actual substantive debate...but of course there is; there always is a big debate when it comes to anything grammar :)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apstyle.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apsty...</a>
I'd be interested to know more about the origin of the illogical punctuation. All the article says is:<p>> According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)."<p>So, quotes come into use to mark quoted passages in the 17th century [1], and are used inside punctuation. Other European languages develop similar or different conventions for quotes, but (based on a quick look at some newspaper websites), all put the quotes inside the punctuation. Typesetters across Europe happily follow this convention for the next three centuries and counting.<p>But some time in the late 18th or early 19th century, American typesetters suddenly realise that it looks better the other way round (and at some point persuade the Canadians too). An observation which has apparently escaped the typesetters of the old world, of whom there are probably ten times as many, for a century or two.<p>This doesn't make any sense.<p>Why did the Americans actually adopt this convention? Was this Noah Webster up to his old tricks again?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History</a>
This claim is unfounded:<p>"the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is;"
I agree that things not part of the quoted material should not be inside the quotes.<p>However, I don't see why that means they have to be <i>outside</i> the quotes. There's a cozy and quaint area below the quote that could serve as a wonderful place for a period or comma to settle in and set up shop to ply its trade.<p>I'd like to see quote-period and quote-comma get ligatures.
I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was customary to print the quotation marks <i>over</i> the period,which can be done on a printing press.
Fast forward about 15 minutes to where a student in the class codes up a linter for essays which changes correctly presented quotes to the style the teacher requests. LaTeX + Gulp!
Stick a fork in it, it's done.<p>I was typing in a list of blurbs this morning, titles for a to-do list. I thought about putting the punctuation the "right" way inside the quotes, then didn't do it. At some point it's better to get your message across clearly than it is to follow strict rules.<p>Relatedly, we're starting to see the rise of two words joined together, aka JavaScript, or SyFy. Looks like computers are doing all sorts of odd things to our punctuation.
The author misses another big cause--the auto period on iOS puts it on the outside. Something that always bugs me, and I'm constantly going back and correcting.
It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me).<p>It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.
After reading the article and most of the comments, I still find one point unclear: if the period does logically belong inside the comma, does it also end the sentence?<p>For example:<p>> He wrote "I live here." Then he stopped writing.<p>> He wrote "I live here.". Then he stopped writing.<p>Of course the latter is the least aesthetic, but is it not the most logical?
This seems like a good place to use ligatures to shrink most of the white space between quotes and following punctuation marks. I do it when I'm writing informally because yeah it's the sensible way to do it, but it does sometimes look awkward.