
The Rise of “Logical Punctuation” (2011) - anishathalye
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_rise_of_logical_punctuation.single.html
======
n0us
"As a result, I have recently instituted a one-point penalty on every
assignment for infractions."

These were always the worst type of teachers. When the majority of students
are telling you and insisting that you are wrong, you are most likely wrong.
This is especially true when they are able to provide a justification for
their answer.

When a quote is used it is my firm belief that what goes inside the quotes
should be a literal copy of whatever you are quoting. A full stop or a comma
can in some cases modify the meaning of the quote and should not go inside the
quotes because it makes the meaning of the quote ambiguous. For example if I
used the above quote at the end of a sentence it would be unclear if the quote
itself contained the period or if the period was just there to close my
sentence.

Grammar has changed significantly over time and will continue to change. The
argument that "that's the way we do it" doesn't hold water in my mind. It was
a poor way of doing things to begin with so we should change.

</rant>

~~~
nkurz
I tend to agree with you, but I'd like to understand better the mental process
that leads him to penalize students for an approach that he concedes is
logically preferable. My guess is that he thinks he's doing them a service by
showing them how their writing will be judged "in the real world".

Perhaps someone who agrees with the author's approach can offer better
insight?

~~~
ldmoray
The author teaches courses on Journalism. Agree with the logical style all you
want, professional journalism is written according to style guides, and those
style guides more often than not dictate American Style punctuation. In this
case, "the real world" includes the newspapers his students wish to end up
employed at.

In the case of a professor taking marks off for punctuation issues when
writing essays on history or economics or engineering, I agree that's
wasteful.

~~~
jdietrich
The "real world" of journalism is now highly globalized and casualized. Young
journalists should expect to work for a large number of publications as
interns, freelancers or short-term staffers. In this climate, adaptability is
a core skill.

It is perfectly appropriate for an instructor to specify a style for an
assignment and grade accordingly. Dogmatically teaching only one style is
outmoded and actively harmful.

------
quanticle
The author admits that "logical punctuation" is an equally valid form, and can
even point to publications for which it is the house style. So why is he
taking points away from his students when they use it? It strikes me as a
rather petty way of enforcing a particular stylistic choice where it doesn't
really matter.

------
alexwebb2
I never liked the idea of _changing the content of a quote_ for any reason.

Let's say I go on the record saying something like this:

> Code reviews are worthless when it comes to those nasty little runtime
> corner cases that crop up now and again.

I sure as hell wouldn't want you writing the following:

> Mr. So-and-so was quoted today as saying "Code reviews are worthless."

Punctuation isn't just there for decoration. It has meaning. Injecting full
stops into quotes in places they don't actually exist not only doesn't make
any logical sense, it can actually change the meaning of the quote in very
significant ways.

~~~
curun1r
Moreover, in the tech world, these punctuation characters often have actual
technical meanings and being precise can be very important. For example,
consider the following punctuations of a quote:

\- "Resolve the DNS record for example.com.".

\- "Resolve the DNS record for example.com".

\- "Resolve the DNS record for example.com."

Only the first and second quotes are unambiguous. The third, which is
supposedly correct, is unable to differentiate between a meaningful trailing
period, which in DNS means to not use search domains, and the period inserted
to end the sentence. While these issues are rare, logical punctuation solves
this problem.

------
danso
Oh wow, the American-style has always just _felt wrong_ to me and I've just
chosen to ignore it in my personal writing, for most of the reasons stated in
the article. But I've had to write it professionally, as a reporter, because
of the Associated Press style guide [1].

Good to know there's an actual substantive debate...but of course there is;
there always is a big debate when it comes to anything grammar :)

[1]
[https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apsty...](https://www.brandeis.edu/communications/digital/images/apstyle.pdf)

------
twic
I'd be interested to know more about the origin of the illogical punctuation.
All the article says is:

> According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted
> in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the
> text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to
> hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the
> mark combines with the following word space)."

So, quotes come into use to mark quoted passages in the 17th century [1], and
are used inside punctuation. Other European languages develop similar or
different conventions for quotes, but (based on a quick look at some newspaper
websites), all put the quotes inside the punctuation. Typesetters across
Europe happily follow this convention for the next three centuries and
counting.

But some time in the late 18th or early 19th century, American typesetters
suddenly realise that it looks better the other way round (and at some point
persuade the Canadians too). An observation which has apparently escaped the
typesetters of the old world, of whom there are probably ten times as many,
for a century or two.

This doesn't make any sense.

Why did the Americans actually adopt this convention? Was this Noah Webster up
to his old tricks again?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#History)

~~~
Avshalom
It's possible that we did it as an intentional Americanism. Which I hear is
how we ended up drinking coffee over tea.

~~~
civilian
Coffee was also a big cash crop in the new world and would have been a lot
cheaper in the U.S. than in Europe, so maybe that was it?

------
ctdavies
This claim is unfounded:

"the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously
rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British.
Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American
rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read
enough edited prose, that is;"

~~~
egypturnash
I have read _mountains_ of professionally-edited prose in my lifetime, and I
_still_ use the "logical" punctuation when I write. I know damn well it's not
the "proper" style here in the States.

Hell, my attachment to logical punctuation extends past quotes. If I'm ending
a sentence with a hyperlink, the period goes outside the [link]. Except in the
rare cases where I'm linking to something with a period in its name.

I wonder if Mr. Yagoda is still giving students a point off for ever use of
logical punctuation in their papers, or if four years of fighting his futile
battle for MLA/AP usage has finally worn him down.

~~~
infogulch
A hyperlink is an especially problematic example, as periods are valid in a
url (even if it's a bit unusual to end with one).

------
tzs
I agree that things not part of the quoted material should not be inside the
quotes.

However, I don't see why that means they have to be _outside_ the quotes.
There's a cozy and quaint area below the quote that could serve as a wonderful
place for a period or comma to settle in and set up shop to ply its trade.

I'd like to see quote-period and quote-comma get ligatures.

~~~
ZenPsycho
There is a historical case for this, as the entire reason for the "illogical"
style to exist in the first place is to emulate period _under_ quote in
professionally typeset (with metal) prose, but using the limited medium of the
_typewriter_.

The limitations of typewriters have also led to a number of other conventions
baked into american style guides, such as placing two spaces after a period.
It's amazing how strongly these odd rules are being held onto well after the
typewriter has been made irrelevant.

------
mkehrt
I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of
typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was
customary to print the quotation marks _over_ the period,which can be done on
a printing press.

~~~
braythwayt
I am not a graphic designer, but I did work in the publishing business earlier
in my career, and this is exactly how I was taught to lay type up by hand: The
quotes go somewhat over the period. There are similar things going on when you
put quotes at the beginning of a line: They hang out a little over the margin.

If you have a period, like this. “Followed by a quote, like this,” The space
between the period and the quote will be smaller than the space between a
period and a capital letter.

Most of this matters most with large type, such as titles or block quotes.

~~~
lolc
Interesting detail. So technology should fix what technology broke and the
debate would be over.

~~~
vorg
It's already done. Unicode provides non-spacing modifiers which will overlay
the previous codepoint. So you can type, for example, either U+0301 (COMBINING
ACUTE ACCENT) or U+030b (COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT) over the period or
comma.

~~~
lolc
I was wondering about that. But I don't think accent characters are intended
for that. They don't seem to work for punctuation. We would have to use
COMBINING DOT BELOW with a zero width space.

"This looks bad​̣̋

Edit: Actually make that a space, maybe it's the proportional font

"This looks still bad ̣̋

------
maaarghk
Fast forward about 15 minutes to where a student in the class codes up a
linter for essays which changes correctly presented quotes to the style the
teacher requests. LaTeX + Gulp!

~~~
civilian
Oh huh, it's weird to think about microsoft word's spelling and grammar
checker as a linter. I like that it.

It sure would have been cool to be able to write custom lint rules when I was
writing a lot of history papers. Like: If I start two neighboring paragraphs
with the same word, as long as that word isn't "The" or "A". (This was a bad
habit I had...)

------
DanielBMarkham
Stick a fork in it, it's done.

I was typing in a list of blurbs this morning, titles for a to-do list. I
thought about putting the punctuation the "right" way inside the quotes, then
didn't do it. At some point it's better to get your message across clearly
than it is to follow strict rules.

Relatedly, we're starting to see the rise of two words joined together, aka
JavaScript, or SyFy. Looks like computers are doing all sorts of odd things to
our punctuation.

------
abruzzi
The author misses another big cause--the auto period on iOS puts it on the
outside. Something that always bugs me, and I'm constantly going back and
correcting.

------
loopbit
It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't
exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't
use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me).

It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social
media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.

~~~
CWuestefeld
That's funny, because it seems to me like the Oxford comma is the logical
rule. The American standard is a special case: "use a comma to separate items
in the list, _except_ the 'and' substitutes for the comma before the last
time".

~~~
Avshalom
See I didn't grow up thinking I was using commas to separate list items, I
grew up thinking I was contracting a bunch "and"s. That is:

    
    
      A red one and a blue one and a green one and a purple one.
      became
      A red one, a blue one, a green one and a purple one.
    

Notably kids seem to do the first one naturally.

If commas were list separators and not just a short hand why would we end them
with "and" at all.

~~~
ashearer
Possible reason: to distinguish the list from an "or" list.

~~~
Avshalom
It was more of a rhetorical question from 6-8 year old me. Yeah, though, and
certainly there's other reasons, like distinguishing it from a bunch of
dependent clauses. That we elide "and"s when speaking a list is of course a
point in favor of the comma being a separator not a replacement too.

At the end of the day it's English; we just do what feels good.

------
nmc
After reading the article and most of the comments, I still find one point
unclear: if the period does logically belong inside the comma, does it also
end the sentence?

For example:

> He wrote "I live here." Then he stopped writing.

> He wrote "I live here.". Then he stopped writing.

Of course the latter is the least aesthetic, but is it not the most logical?

~~~
breadbox
Yes. If a quote ends with a period, then it ends the sentence. If the sentence
shouldn't end there, then the period is replaced with a comma (even if the
quote was of a complete sentence).

> He wrote "I live here," and then he stopped writing.

This rule only applied to periods, though -- if the sentence ends with (say) a
question mark, then you leave it in:

> He wrote, "Do I live here?" and then he stopped writing.

~~~
marincounty
I would have put a comma after the last quotation mark.

Personally, I think instructors put too much emphasis on punctuation. I had
one instructor ding me for not spelling out numbers between 0-10. I still
don't know if he was right. I don't really care.

Looking back he had some issues. This Doctor would love to argue with the
boys. We were all so young. We didn't understand why he would make such a big
deal out of little errors. Dr. B said, "Come to my office after class!"
Looking back, I'm suprised he didn't offer us wine in those pointless office
visits.

------
Avshalom
This seems like a good place to use ligatures to shrink most of the white
space between quotes and following punctuation marks. I do it when I'm writing
informally because yeah it's the sensible way to do it, but it does sometimes
look awkward.

