Syntactic heresies OR Clearly there's something wrong with me

[learnedax]

I opened up Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and I do not make it through the acknowledgments before snidely thinking to myself "Oh, the author's one of those grammarians." Which is to say, she has not seen the light and so does not use the serial comma. Apparently that inelegant ambiguity is more tolerated in her native Britain, however, which I should perhaps take as an extenuating circumstance.

Comments

[laurion]

Your question mark example illustrates again my preferences towards disambiguation. Here the comma lies outside the quote to indicate that it terminates the question asked by Ms. Gordon, and is not the terminator of the quote. For proper clarity it should probably read: Who was it who wrote, "Life is a stage attacked by an idiot."? When directly quoting, one should try to maintain the punctuation and flow of the original source. This, of course, is in contrast to the use of quotation marks to delineate dialogue or "fragmentary references"(Sometimes used for sarcasm indicators, or emphasis, or a 'his words, not mine' situation).

Generally, I try to apply the punctuation where it best demonstrates what the purpose of the punctuation is and the source of the punctuation is. So depending on context I might have punctuation inside my quotation marks, outside, or both.