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

[perbac.livejournal.com]

As opposed to putting periods on the outside. I am not sure - it's partially related to what laurion said about disambiguation, but there's also a personal neuroticism about making things pair up. (Trying to analyze this for the first time; please bear with me.) In my head, a garden-variety sentence should end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point. A sentence that begins and ends with special punctuation (for lack of better term; that is, the sentence is wholly a quotation or parenthetical statement) should end in the special punctuation, meaning that the period, question mark, or exclamation point should be on the inside. A sentence that contains a quotation/parenthetical mark pair, but that is not surrounded by the pair, is really just a garden-variety sentence with some special stuff in the middle - which means that it should end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point, *not* the special punctuation. Same with other punctuation that is part of the framework of the outer sentence and *not* part of the "special punctuation" fragment. Maybe that's the key - that the punctuation belongs to the outer sentence, so it has no business being inside inner sub-sentences/fragments/parentheticals/quotes/etc. (sorry; I seem to be missing some vocabulary).

Example 1:
This is a sentence.

Example 2:
"I'm quoting something."

Example 3a:
This sentence contains a "quoted" word.

Example 3b:
I'm not sure if this is "correct".

Example 3c:
I'm not sure if this is "correct", but it is more logical to me.

...

Strangely enough, quoted dialog has never bothered me (having the comma before the quotes instead of after):

"Blah blah," he said.

Maybe I have been conditioned to special case it (under my personal "grammar logic" rules) in my head.

*frown* Maybe I am a bad person that should be arrested and reconditioned by the Punctuation Police. I never thought of that.

This is weird. I haven't thought about my basic writing assumptions in years.