
The Punctuation Guide - DavidSJ
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/index.html
======
SeanLuke
[http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-
marks.html#adja...](http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-
marks.html#adjacentpunctuation)

> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the
> quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.

I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense.

[http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-
dash.html](http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html)

> The em dash is typically used without spaces on either side, and that is the
> style used in this guide. Most newspapers, however, set the em dash off with
> a single space on each side.

Isn't this is US versus Britain, not "newspapers" versus "typical use"? And
AFAIK it's not a "single space": it's ideally a half-space (in US style). The
problem with no space is that your eyes can't easily disambiguate it from a
hyphenated single word.

~~~
namelost
British is an _en_ dash separated by spaces, American is an em dash with no
spaces.

~~~
jameshart
And make sure to use a non-breaking space before your en-dash, so it doesn't
get orphaned at the beginning of a line.

------
ranko
This is quite specific to US English, for example "Top Ten Tips" number 2
about quotation marks. As Robert Bringhurst says in _The Elements of
Typographic Style_ :

Most North American editors like their commas and periods inside the raised
commas, "like this;" but their colons and semicolons outside. Many British
editors prefer to put all punctuation outside, with the milk and the cat.

~~~
teddyh
[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-
style.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html)

> _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._

~~~
hanbura
Arguments for British style quotes:

\- doesn't mutate the quoted string

\- fewer weird edge cases

\- encodes more information in same amount of characters (if quote might have
ended on punctuation)

\- needs fewer rules

Arguments for American style quotes

\- It looks more balanced if punctuation marks that use less ink than a
quotation mark come before it

I think there is no surprise that hackers prefer the straight-forward way that
might look marginally worse

~~~
Harvey-Specter
In the British style what is the rule if the quotation ends in punctuation? Do
they include additional punctuation outside the quotation, since presumably
the punctuation inside the quotation doesn't count as ending the sentence?

I'm thinking of a sentence like:

> Bill said "I prefer American style."

Would the British write it as follows?

> Bill said "I prefer American style.".

~~~
dghf
No, we'd write it the first way, even if the quotation ended with punctuation
not appropriate to the sentence as a whole: e.g.

> Bill asked "Do you prefer American style?"

even though the sentence, taken as a whole, is a statement rather than a
question.

------
IshKebab
Actually pretty good but it still falls into the trap of thinking that there
_are_ rules, and that some people follow them and some people break them. For
example:

> When used in this way, the bracketed information should be an addition, not
> a substitution. For example, if the original quotation is “She never called
> back,” do not change it to “[Lucy] never called back.” Instead write: “She
> [Lucy] never called back.” (Note: Many newspapers ignore this rule. In
> professional and academic writing, it is better to follow it.)

Says who?

About the only real "rule" I can think of in English is that you use "an" iff
the following word starts with a vowel sound. But even some people (idiots)
break that rule for the weirdly specific case of 'historic'.

~~~
ggus
I agree: there are no rules in a language.

The baseline is to try to produce something that can be understood by your
public, so try to stick to whatever convention they are used to, or come up
with new ways that they can make a sense of.

But I won't even call that a "rule".

~~~
mh-cx
> I agree: there are no rules in a language.

Really? Isn't that a bit broad? It may be half true for some languages but
definitely not for all.

For example in Germany we have the "Der Duden" which is not only a dictionary
that defines the correct spelling of words but also contains a huge set of
grammatical rules. It's still the de-facto standard for correct language in
German.

And even in english you'd probably agree that there are some rules, e.g. when
it comes to the correct spelling of words.

~~~
pluma
The Duden doesn't define correct spelling, it merely documents it. It's
decidedly not a prescriptive work. What you're likely thinking of is the
German orthography rules defined by the _Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung_ and
in turn strongly influenced by actual practice rather than just dogma -- the
most recent revisions are very forgiving with regard to acceptable variations.

Linguists on the other hand have given up on prescriptivism decades ago.
Scientific linguistics are entirely descriptivist, studying how language is
used rather than prescribing how it ought to be used.

~~~
bmn__
One particularly nasty hold-out of minority prescriptivists among those
lexicographers was the renouncement of capital sharp s. It took about a good
century to force them to not deny reality anymore.

------
thomasfoster96
> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the
> quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.

Please never do this.

Commas and full stops have meaning. You’re modifying the original quote
without telling the reader that you have done so. How this became the accepted
practice in so many style guides and grammar checkers I will never understand.
I shall defer to Geoffrey Pullum’s _Punctuation and human freedom_ [0], whose
title is entirely appropriate, for justification. Steven Pinker’s _The Sense
of Style_ [1] can provide the unconvinced further justification.

[0]
[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf)
[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-
Writing/...](https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-
Writing/dp/0143127799)

------
zuzun
If you're looking for a free resource, I found the Style Manual by the U.S.
Government Printing Office a helpful reference on how to write and typeset
things in English.

[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-
STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-d...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-
STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-detail.html)

------
mysterypie
Talking about punctuation abuse, people that litter their emails or texts with
ellipses is something I can't figure out:

"Hey! I haven't heard from you in a while... I'm still in Boston... Can't
complain cause it's been good... I saw the circus before it closed..."

What do they think they're saying with all those crazy unneeded ellipses?

~~~
oddlyaromatic
Lots of people do this to connect loosely related sentences because to them
the "..." reads like a little pause. I guess it feels more comfortable, less
formal, and let's them get the words out without worrying about structure too
much.

------
rocqua
What about period placement and display-style math (as opposed to inline
math). Take the following example.

From FOO we can conclude that:

    
    
        CAT = FOOBAR
    

Does one place a period inside that display math? It has nothing to do with
the equation, but it seems like the only reasonable place for it.

~~~
benji-york
In that case, I elide the terminal.

------
nickcw
I enjoyed the rules about the em dash — It reminded me of the English class
that I was taught that you could use it in place of pretty much every bit of
punctuation and the subsequent essays I wrote having optimized the rules of
English punctuation somewhat ;-)

------
gandutraveler
Let Elaine do the explanation on exclamation mark :
[https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU](https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU)

------
happy-go-lucky
As an aspiring technical writer, these were my go-to references.

[https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/](https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/)

[https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/](https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/)

[http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html](http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html)

------
jwilk
> _Requests that are phrased as questions should end with a period._

> _Would you please send this report to the person indicated on the cover._

Wait, really? IANA native speaker, but I don't think I've ever seen such
requests without question mark.

~~~
SerLava
Call me illiterate but that would be seen as either a mistake or as
intentional rudeness.

We structure instructions as requests for the sake of politeness, and using a
period here would come across as a very subtle mockery of this. In context it
would imply some level of disdain for the recipient's right to turn down the
request.

------
osteele
Fun! I'd like to see this for other natural languages, and for programming
languages.

------
badcede
Does case count as punctuation? 'I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.'

------
Voodoo463
Do you object greatly to the absence of the interrobang‽

I know I do.

------
Stratoscope
Much of the advice here is good, but some is a bit weird.

> _I will give the document to my brother, Tom. (The writer has only one
> brother. The brother 's name is nonessential and therefore set off with a
> comma.)_

> _I will give the document to my brother Tom. (The writer has more than one
> brother. In this case, the specific brother—Tom—is essential information and
> should not be set off with a comma.)_

I know this used to be considered an important distinction, but I think few
writers would worry about it today. Does the reader care if Tom is the
writer's only brother? Either way the writer is talking only about Tom, not
any possible other brothers. I think many writers today would leave out the
comma in either case.

Take an example where it's clear there is only one:

 _I am going to visit my mother Helen._

 _I am going to visit my mother, Helen._

I don't think leaving out the comma implies that I have more than one mother,
and I doubt if anyone cares much about the comma here either.

The trend today is to simply leave out commas where the meaning is clear.

This example of the Oxford comma is really confusing:

> _I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics, and
> macroeconomics next semester._

It's a valid point that omitting the Oxford comma could make it sound like
"microeconomics and macroeconomics" is a single course, but using the comma
makes it sound like the first three courses are being taken _this_ semester
and macroeconomics next semester. It should be rewritten:

> _Next semester I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics,
> and macroeconomics._

There is a similar situation where the Oxford comma is needed in the
programming joke:

 _There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache
invalidation, and off-by-one errors._

It ruins the joke (to my eyes) if you leave it out:

 _There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache
invalidation and off-by-one errors._

And enough with the commas already in a sentence like this:

> _Your work has been, frankly, awful._

Ugh. Does anyone actually write that instead of:

 _Your work has been frankly awful._

(Of course I would _never_ say that to someone but would find a more
constructive way to put it.)

My advice: Write simply and clearly. Know these purported rules but take them
with a healthy grain of salt. Omit unnecessary punctuation where the meaning
is clear to the reader. And if you need extra punctuation to avoid confusion,
consider rewriting the sentence for clarity.

~~~
rocqua
Regarding the final example, I disagree.

"Your work has been frankly awful" has frankly as an adverb. That is, it was
awful in a frank way.

"Your work has been, frankly, awful" makes it clear that frankly is a
parenthetical remark that isn't part of the sentence.

With commas 'frankly' modifies how the writer intends the sentence to be
received. Without, it modifies how awful the writer things your work has been.
I suppose in some situations, the absurdity of 'being awful in a frank way' is
sufficient to resolve the ambiguity.

~~~
Stratoscope
That's an excellent point. Perhaps this is another case where it would be
better to rewrite the sentence:

"Frankly, your work has been awful."

