Why is US style of punctuation with quotation marks this way?
 

Hi all! I was searching info on this subject - commas and periods inside or outside of quotation marks and everything seems to say pretty much the same except one forum post somewhere where an OP was referring to some source explaining why US style of punctuation places commas and periods inside quotes like:

instead of

I thought to digg into it later and now I can't find that page.

Does anyone know the reason of placing commas inside?

I don't know why they do it, but the Americans are wrong again - as usual. ;) :)

Maybe this was the page you were looking at?

http://grammartips.homestead.com/inside.html

Though I'm sure I've seen a better explanation with more little bits and pieces like 'semicolons and colons always go outside the quotation marks', stuffed if I can find it now.

Yet another example of how rules made to simplify things (like the US style 'punctuation inside quotation marks') can be stupid, and having a more flexible approach is better IMO. Then again, the world is full of stupid people....

I think this is a very easy mistake to make with English, and does not depend on which side of the Atlantic one grew up on. I think I make it too sometimes. So far as my side (UK) is concerned, English grammar has been a bit anything-goes for past several decades, but inside the quotes is "correct." <---which in this example, seems to me to be counter-intuitive!

I put the punctuation where it makes sense so, for example:
The man shouted "Hey, you!" at John.
Jeremy said "I don't like fish.", apparently. [if that's all he said]
or
Jeremy said "I don't like fish ...", apparently. [if he went on to say more]
In other words I only quote what was said, as if it were a string literal. This may not be strictly correct but I'd rather be logically correct then follow some arbitrary rule.
Grammar rules change all the time and are often only there because of somebody's affectation (spelling is like this also with "color" and "colour", for example). As long as you're not publishing what you type then it ought not to matter, provided you make your meaning clear, and in that case you would have house guidelines to tell you what to do.

Defenitely not. The source I'm talking about was saying something about times of mechanical typewriters or something like this... My bad I haven't focused my attention on it.

We drive on the right side of the road.

Your search for answers would be more well suited to an American English web site. Opps, that was a poorly written sentence.

There's a fragment at the bottom which claims that commas inside the quotes goes back to a matter of hand typesetting. I can't say for sure, but it doesn't sound likely to me. I never set type by hand myself, but I've worked for a publisher/printer that had a letterpress department, and we did hand setting and I worked a lot with the printers and typesetters. I used to do layout for order forms, with multiple columns of |......1226/X123......| and we never lost any of those periods, which are just as small as a comma.

(Then we got a phototypesetter, and I learned how to photo-typeset them, which was my first contact with anything actually "computerised," and the precursor to my being given a Unix system to find out how to manage. But that's another story :). The chief hand typesetter got to learn the photo-typesetting, but, sadly, I didn't get to learn his craft.)

The one I'm talking about is a forum thread with discussion.

Traditionally, commas and periods have been placed inside quotation marks because it looks better in typewritten or handwritten copy; there is no other reason.

As far as I am concerned, it looks better in variable-spaced fonts too, though I know that the UK Guardian disagrees with me.

They are allowed to be wrong.

Large punctuation marks, such as question marks and exclamation points, are placed inside quotation marks only if they are part of the quotation. One ending punctuation mark per sentence suffices.

Compare, for example,

273 has it correct. When placing the , inside the quotation marks it indicates there is more to the sentence but that what is within the marks is all that was quoted.

As I tried to say, badly, I tend to use quotes as I would quote tags or quotes in C/C++/whatever and quote what I wish to. If "grammar" dictates that I'm wrong to do so it's obviously flawed and ought to be ignored.

In the States, we would use elipses to indicate that a portion was omitted from a quotation:

Frankly, I do not believe and have never read or been taught (and I've read extensively on grammar and syntax, having made my living with my pen most of my career) that the position of the comma is adequate to convey anything to a casual reader. If that is how it is interpreted in the Commonwealth, the secret is deeply held.:)

I thought placing the periods and the commas inside the quotation marks was the rule for English in general (not only US English). BTW, I find it awkward and unnatural unless it's an exclamation/question sign that is part of the phrase you're quoting (as in frankbell's example above).

So, if someone ends a paragraph in an academic paper with some author's quote, do they have to put the full stop period inside the quotation marks? It would look weird to me :)

The use of elipses is used if there is no other break.

Punctuation is important, it breaks sentences and/or paragraphs into smaller portions. Whether a casual reader knowingly understands this or not is neither here nor there. I have seen enough posts in LQ telling people to format their posts differently so they can be more easily understood to think casual readers do actually understand the need for punctuation.

That looks like you would write
Isn't that excessive? In this case period in quotes can be omitted:

...

I may well omit the period, yes, and often do. But in that case I would accept that my English was not correct. Though I would expect the sentence to be understood and few people to point out my "error".

I agree wholeheartedly. Grammar and syntax are the rules of the road; punctuation is the signposts.

Nevertheless, I am still slightly skeptical of the claim that the position of a comma vis-a-vis a closing quotation mark signals anything other than imprecise typography.

Would you be so kind as to point me to a scholarly citation?

The American LEGAL PROFESSION style is to put the punctutation within the quotes, even if the quoted material had no punctuation at the end of the quote. Given the corrosive effect of the law, that practice has subsumed all before it in the US. The accurate, and therefore correct, practice is to have the final punctuation mark within quotes in the US, and outside the end quote whenever accuracy counts or outside the US.

I don't see how, if it is part of the actual sentence the quote comes from, that is is imprecise typography. To me not putting it in when it is part of the sentence being qouted is imprecise typography. Likewise using elipses in the place of something that was in the actual sentence is imprecise typography, there is no need to change what was there to something else.

I can't simply because it is a convention I have learned, in the Commonwealth, through usage not through reading. I am happy to concede if you are able to find something that shows me to be incorrect. This thread is afterall about American usage not Australian or Commonwealth usage.

UK and USA --- Two Nations Divided by a Common Language.

...It's an exaggeration. There are some obvious spelling differences, a handful of words that have actually different meanings, and maybe "street" talk differs (but here USA is the world's influence, not UK). Maybe I haven't read that many of the great American novelists, but I've read a few, and, they are just ...English!

When it comes to sales and marketing presentations and management jargon, it may be a different matter. But that's a particular form of crap spoken by a subset of society, much of which may have originated in America, but it isn't American English.

The reason I would include a period or elipses at the end of a quote would be to accurately report what was said. Whilst people don't actually speak punctuation whether the quoted represents all that the person said or not is, to me, important.
What I would not do is put punctuation from my enclosing text inside of the quotes as seems to be done with commas in "correct" usage.
That's because I am aiming to represent what is being quoted accurately and not simply follow a rule.

+1.

Some people do. Period.

;)

Actually, some people really do, if they form their spoken sentences correctly. Some people even sing it. Quite apart from the magical imagery, I've always enjoyed the commas in the lyric line,

In the secret space of dreams where, dreaming, I lay amazed...


.

Speaking of speaking punctuation, the great Victor Borge did just that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA

Aside to k3lt01: Give me a couple of days to dig my sources out of the moving boxes and I'll get back to you. :)

Will wait with baited breath :hattip: