The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

&#62;&#62; <i>If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)." I don't doubt Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that we are simply accustomed to the style.</i><p>This is the real story here I think: people invented the rule to suit their preferences, but over time we've forgotten the rule's origin and now treat it like a holy truth. (Or worse yet a matter of "grammar"! Run, run - you've made a grammatical mistake!) You are likely to discover this over and over again if you study the background of many rules that (some) writing teachers insist on and that people like Lynn Truss use as an excuse to foam at the mouth.<p>Here are some of my least-favorite myths, in no particular order:<p>+ You should never end a sentence with a preposition. (Sheer bullshit: English uses countless phrasal verbs ('throw away') and in many other cases avoiding the final preposition produces stuffy nonsense.)<p>+ You should never split an infinitive. (A completely made-up rule, based on mistakenly trying to apply Latin rules to a Germanic language.)<p>+ The word 'hopefully' can only mean 'in a hopeful spirit' and therefore you shouldn't say, "Hopefully, we'll arive before lunch tomorrow." (Sheer bullshit again: 'hopefully' there functions as an adverb modifying the entire clause 'we'll arrive before lunch tomorrow'. The sentence as a whole clearly and obviously means "It is to be hoped that..." or less formally "We hope that..." This use of 'hopefully' is no different than 'fortunately', 'sadly', 'happily' or 'luckily' in countless sentences.)<p>+ Don't start sentences with 'but' or 'and' or 'however'. (Just goofy.)<p>+ Never use the passive voice. (Overdoing it at the least: Yes, a lot of beauraucratic and other bad writing uses the passive in excess, but the passive is not <i>per se</i> evil or always wrong.)

I wonder if Wikipedia adopting that style has had any influence on its popularity online, or if that's an example of convergent evolution. It was decided way back in 2002 to use the logical punctuation style there, in a fairly ad-hoc way when it was still a small project. Part of the motivation appears to have been a sort of UK/US compromise. It's since been reworded significantly, but this was the original style suggestion there (introduced on August 23, 2002):<p><i>In most cases, simply follow the usual rules of English punctuation. A few points where the Wikipedia may differ from usual usage follow.</i><p><i>With quotation marks, we suggest splitting the difference between American and English usage.</i><p><i>Although it is not a rigid rule, it is probably best to use the "double quotes" for most quotations, as they are easier to read on the screen, and use 'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations". This is the American style.</i><p><i>When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within the quotation marks. This is the British style.</i>

&#62;When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style, if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side, they both replied, in essence: "How about never? Is never good for you?"<p>It seems to me the next logical question here is, "why not?" Just about the only arguments in favor of "American" punctuation are tradition and some hazy sense that periods outside qoutes look wrong, whereas the best argument for logical punctuation is that the point of writing is to communicate clearly, and logical punctuation is more clear at virtually no cost.

As a non-native speaker, this is one thing I found very irritating about American English writing. It never made sense to me to put something in quotes that is not part of the quote.

Informal writing rarely features <i>narration</i> to any significant degree, which is where the so-called American Style is most "logical" to the extent that we're even really talking about logic. In forums and email and texting, quotes are usually either blocked-off text, or the quotes are used to specifically emphasize an exact character string (often a single word).<p>Wikipedia is also generally not about narration, and quotes are usually meant to be exact.<p>With narration, the goal is not to convey exactness rather to tell a story. Interrupting a character's quote to insert ", he said," influences the original meaning (if there even is such a thing) no matter where the punctuation lies. But that's not important because specifying precisely what a character said usually isn't the point of a story.<p>Furthermore, if you write your own sentence, and finish with quote of an entire sentence, why isn't there a period for both sentences? Brian said, "let's go.".<p>Looked at this way, it's easy to see why, given the choice, narrators would choose the more aesthetically pleasing placement inside the quotation marks.

Now if only ISO 8601 date formatting would catch on... (yyyy-mm-dd)

Just imagine a programming language where you have to write<p><pre><code> print "some text," function(), "moretext"; </code></pre> instead of<p><pre><code> print "some text", function(), "moretext";</code></pre>

I think the American style looks better in non-fixed-width fonts, because it looks much closer to the way actual handwriting should look: the comma or period <i>underneath</i> the quotation mark.<p>I suspect this is the reason people started doing it that way in the first place.<p>And I suspect people started doing it that way on both sides of the Atlantic. It's just that Britain ended up standardizing one way, America the other. (Possibly yet another instance of English language usage evolving more quickly in Britain than in America.)<p>I'd appreciate if anybody can confirm or deny this hypothesis. And I find it disappointing that the Slate article has no historical treatment of the issue.<p>(Honestly, <i>both</i> styles look weird to me in fixed-width fonts, which basically arose in tandem with the modern computer.)

I'm British and, when I was at school, we were taught that punctuation should go inside the quotation mark. This was one of those horribly prescriptive rules, the breaking of which was considered very wrong indeed. I'm surprised that this article calls this "American Style", given my experiences.<p>I started ignoring the convention pretty when I started using computers because, as the article says, it's hard to defend it on merits and it just looks plain odd, especially in a fixed-width font.

I'm kind of surprised that this hasn't appeared in the news before, given how important an issue it is for technical writing. After all, you don't tell someone to delete a line in vi by typing "dd."

As a British tech blogger who writes on American tech sites, I've spent a lot of time arguing this particular subject with editors, copy editors, and proof readers.<p>Grammar should help the reader, not hinder. Logical/readable grammar all the way.

Good. I never quite understood why I was putting punctuation inside quotation marks all these years, besides the fact that my teachers told me that it is the right way.<p>Let me see how this feels when I use "logical punctuation".<p>Yes, that feels good.

I've been doing this for years despite knowing what it's "supposed" to be. I'm glad to finally not be in the minority.<p>And I had no idea it had a name or that it was common outside the US.

Even though I have followed the 'proper' way all my life, I recently realized that there are many instances where having the punctuation inside is confusing. I now have absolutely no problem putting it on the outside when it's less confusing.<p>I'm seriously considering putting it on the outside all the time now.

Well if we're going to start making English logical we have a lot of work to do.

Weird.<p>Last week I just made a commitment to start doing this the "correct" way. I find it's very difficult after years of programming, though.<p>Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps. The inconsistency between caps drives me nuts, even though I know it's the "right" way to do things.<p>It's fascinating to see topics like this kind of float around for months or years and then suddenly become news items. Wonder if a shift is really happening? Or is the story just noticing a trend in people making the same mistakes?

Is there a recognised difference between:<p>The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".<p>and<p>He said, "I've been outside".<p>?<p>To me, "logical" punctuation in the first case would be as written, and in the second case would be:<p>He said, "I've been outside.".<p>indicating that both the enclosing and enclosed sentence is complete.

Also according to the Internet, "you" is spelled "u". Everyone should adjust their internal dictionaries so that u don't become an establishment sellout.<p>Personally, it makes sense for "scare quotes" to not contain punctuation, as they are not complete sentences. But it doesn't make sense for direct quotes to not contain punctuation, as in `He said, "Hello there".' He didn't say "Hello there", he said "Hello there."<p>(It might seem logical to have two periods in that case, but it's ugly, so the second one can just be omitted for maximum conciseness. That's why the period goes inside the quotation marks. Similarly, it would be confusing and ugly to pretend to end a sentence in the middle of a sentence, so quotes that are not at the end of the sentence "end" with a comma. The period is a pretty strong message to pause, and you don't want to overuse it.<p>IMO.)

It amuses me that an article about punctuation and typographic conventions completely ignores the standard of using typographer’s quotes instead of inch marks. “This,” instead of "this." Same goes for apostrophes versus foot marks.<p>As a graphic design student myself, I am quite snobbish about using perfect typography. This includes proper quotation marks, as well as following the rule of putting periods and commas within quotes. (I also follow the rules religiously when it comes to en-dashes versus em-dashes and hyphens, and when to uses spaces around them. I also make sure to only use a single space after period.)

This is something I've struggled with in my writing, especially as someone who's done blogging and AP style writing for a news outlet... Sometimes I write a sentence that might end in a question mark, which shouldn't be a part of a quote and rather placing the punctuation mark outside of the quotes (or inside for that matter) I end up completely re-working the sentence to avoid the problem. But I would have to agree that it doesn't always make sense to stick so firmly to that grammar rule. It's nice to see that I'm not alone in that thought.

I wonder what are your thoughts on the double-spacing after full stops. I find it terrible, but I know projects who enforce this style in code comments.

<i>A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)." I don't doubt Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that we are simply accustomed to the style.</i>

Been doing it for years, never looked back. Quotes should delimit the quote, your period is outside that quote. The closest I get is where a comma <i>would</i> work in a quote, and the writing interjects the speaker. e.g., "Grab that," foo barred, "and get over here", because "Grab that", foo barred, ", and get over here" is fugly.

Yeah, I thought the period-inside-quotes thing was stupid and only used it when I had to for school. Stupid stupid stupid.

I've been ignoring that rule for a long time. If it wasn't in the original, it doesn't go in quotes.<p>And another thing. Using "an" when a word starts an H is followed very inconsistently. In fact, I only seem to hear it in the phrase "an historic". "An human" doesn't really speak that way.

Of course the period should follow the quotation marks. Periods, exclamation marks, and question marks are the delimiters for English sentences and belong at the end in the same way that a semicolon belongs at the end of a line in C/C++.

The resolution here seems obvious to me: when you find yourself in a bike shed conversation, go with the standard. If, however, one option or the other is preferable for some practical reason, choose that option.

Try writing a parser that recognizes punctuation inside the quotes, then try to write one that recognizes it outside. It's quite clear that the latter is cleaner and simpler.

is it me or is this site using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)</a> "" instead of quotation marks? “ ” .

A recent development in Swedish - at least in online communications - is the use of the French manner of putting a bloody space in front of exclamation marks ! Looks awful.

The Chicago Manual of Style can go jump in a ditch. American style is terrible and should be abandoned immediately.