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

[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.