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]

!

I happened also to pick this up recently (last weekend) and the lack-of-serial-comma'ing also caught my eye. Sigh.

But apparently you're one of those people who puts his periods inside his quote-marks.. whatever it is that that is called (think she even referenced it in one of the 10 pages I've read). Hmph.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, that's actually a more complex area in my book, but I'm largely in your camp. Because the standard (merely for typesetting niceness) of punctuation inside is so complete in America, in formal non-technical writing I tend to place them there. In informal writing I place them on the outside, because that's the logical place for it, but I am considering the British practice of allowing a quotation that includes a terminal punctuation mark to end a sentence. (So that one does not have to write "He said 'Stop!'.".) And it is in fact this usage that you see above.

In more technical writing, I will always be explicit about the contents of a string.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

You're hmphing putting periods inside quotation marks? As opposed to what? I just skimmed through the period and quotation marks sections of Karen Gordon's "The Well-tempered Sentence" and can't find a case of a period after the quotation marks, although she does have a question mark outside in the example:
Who was it who wrote, "Life is a stage attacked by an idiot"?

I'm also a serial comma fan, but comma use is one of the big Brit/US divides.

[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.

[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.