A question of quotation marks...

[javasaurus]

If you end a written question with a quoted word or phrase, do you put the question mark before or after the quotation marks? If the question mark is part of the quoted material, it goes before the marks, otherwise it goes after. The same rule applies to exclamation points. However, with periods and commas, the mark *always* goes before the quotation marks. I don't know why, and I believe the rule is different (and more sensible) in England, but that's the rule for America. Who makes these rules, anyway?

Now for my question: I'm coauthor on a paper that will be published soon. We just got the proofs from the journal, and they put a period after the quotation marks. Should I correct it, or let it slide, hoping that this little "error" will help propogate change in American grammar?

Comments

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Does the journal have a style guide that mentions such things, or do they inform authors if they follow a specific style guide?

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Yes. They suggest "The ACS Style Guide," 2nd edition. Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to a copy. If I don't find any other errors (and I haven't, so far), I'm probably not going to worry about it.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

try google? maybe a summary of ACS exists. I know I have a copy but its buried in my garage.

From the Hacker's Dictionary (and this section has been written exactly like this since before 1988):

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

Standard usage would make this

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."

but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1) dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting.

I always put the . or comma outside the quotes. always.

Granted, I don't write fiction.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info! The logical half of my brain prefers the "logical" quoting, but the purist part of my brain screams against it. The dd. example is very nice.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

i write software manuals and documentation. "logical" is the only thing that works for me.