A British Punctuation Invasion? The Trend in Handling Quotations May Not Be an Educated Choice.

 On Slate.com, author and writing teacher Ben Yagoda recently observed that there’s a trend online of Americans opting for the British style of using quotation marks with other punctuation.

British style sometimes places periods and commas after a closing quotation mark.

When using the words “jolly good”, one should always add, “good fellow”.

The idea is that neither the comma nor the period is part of the quotation. Therefore it has no business inside the quotation marks.

Exclamation points and question marks can go inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on whether or not they're part of the quotation.

Do you know how to pronounce “schedule”?

American style agrees with British style on how to handle question marks and exclamation points. But it disagrees about the periods and commas. For aesthetic reasons, American style always puts the period and comma inside of any closing quotation marks.

When pronouncing the word “schedule,” add a hard K like in “school.”

As someone who was brought up reading American publications and who learned editing in American style, I like this approach better. A period or comma outside of a closing quotation mark takes up more space on the page and looks funny. It draws the eye and calls attention to itself.

Citing Twitter posts and message boards as examples, Yagoda points out that British style is gaining in popularity. And he offers a reason: it's simply more logical. In Yagoda's view, "editor-free zones" like Twitter allow users such as Conan O’Brien to throw off the shackles of oppressive editing and usher in a new era of rational punctuation.

I, too, am seeing a lot more periods and commas outside of quotation marks. And I agree with Yagoda that this could be the wave of the future. But I disagree with him about why it's happening.

Until the explosion of the Internet and blogs, most “published” writing was edited by professionals well versed a specific editing style. In America, that almost always meant they kept their periods and commas inside of quotation marks. But with the explosion of blogs, Twitter, and other open-to-all writing platforms, people with no professional editing experience can publish their words to the world. And while they may be opting for British style more often, one can't just assume it's an educated choice.

A likely reason for the seeming uptick in British close quotation style – a reason Yagoda glosses over -- is the possibility that it's a result not of the masses’ preference but their confusion.

To say that people are choosing this style suggests they're aware of their options. And, in my experience, most professional writers are not.

A lot of people naturally assume that a period or a comma should come after a closing quotation mark simply because it makes sense. Plus, people who don’t know better tend to assume that punctuation rules are consistent. Many would never guess that different rules apply to periods and question marks.

So the driving force behind this new trend may be less about enlightened democracy than about ignorance. And you can’t help but wonder how many of the people writing like “this”, would be mortified and quickly changed their ways if only they knew that almost every major newspaper publisher, book publisher, and style guide in America does it the other way.

Tags: COPY EDITING, PUNCTUATION

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 19th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.