Of Snobs and Quotation Marks

As much as I complain about grammar snobs, I get where they’re coming from. You go to the trouble to learn something, you buy that it’s important, then you spend the rest of your life watching people trampling all over this “important” rule.

That’s why they jump so fast to correct you when you end a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive or use “between” where they think you should use “among” -- or whatever rule they have the hots for.

I’ll confess I’m not immune to those impulses. And working as an editor and proofreader makes it worse. It’s my job to stay on high alert for errors, crouched and ready to pounce.

And though I’m convinced that language peevishness is a very bad idea, I still can’t help but be irked by a few things I consider wrong, like the punctuation in the following sentence:

My wife likes to use the word “fantastic”, though I prefer “wonderful”.

In British English, that would be correct. But in American English, periods and commas go inside the quotation marks. And, no, it doesn’t matter whether they’re conceptually part of the quotation. It’s a style convention decided long ago for aesthetic reasons.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know this rule. Instead, when faced with a sentence like the one above, people try to apply logic instead. But the rule isn’t logical. (Especially when you consider that there’s a different rule for quotation marks and exclamation points. Those can go before or after a closing quotation mark, depending on whether they pertain to the whole sentence or just the quoted part.)

So virtually all the writing you see on the Internet that isn’t professionally edited gets it wrong.

As a result, the rule is probably dying. But it’s not dead yet. And until it is, seeing a period or comma after a closing quotation mark will continue to bring out in me something I wish wasn’t there.

 

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Monday, September 23rd, 2013 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.