
The Rise of "Logical Punctuation". - brianl
http://www.slate.com/id/2293056/
======
telemachos
>> _If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the
merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical,
considerations. 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)." I don't doubt
Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the
point is that we are simply accustomed to the style._

This is the real story here I think: people invented the rule to suit their
preferences, but over time we've forgotten the rule's origin and now treat it
like a holy truth. (Or worse yet a matter of "grammar"! Run, run - you've made
a grammatical mistake!) You are likely to discover this over and over again if
you study the background of many rules that (some) writing teachers insist on
and that people like Lynn Truss use as an excuse to foam at the mouth.

Here are some of my least-favorite myths, in no particular order:

\+ You should never end a sentence with a preposition. (Sheer bullshit:
English uses countless phrasal verbs ('throw away') and in many other cases
avoiding the final preposition produces stuffy nonsense.)

\+ You should never split an infinitive. (A completely made-up rule, based on
mistakenly trying to apply Latin rules to a Germanic language.)

\+ The word 'hopefully' can only mean 'in a hopeful spirit' and therefore you
shouldn't say, "Hopefully, we'll arive before lunch tomorrow." (Sheer bullshit
again: 'hopefully' there functions as an adverb modifying the entire clause
'we'll arrive before lunch tomorrow'. The sentence as a whole clearly and
obviously means "It is to be hoped that..." or less formally "We hope that..."
This use of 'hopefully' is no different than 'fortunately', 'sadly', 'happily'
or 'luckily' in countless sentences.)

\+ Don't start sentences with 'but' or 'and' or 'however'. (Just goofy.)

\+ Never use the passive voice. (Overdoing it at the least: Yes, a lot of
beauraucratic and other bad writing uses the passive in excess, but the
passive is not _per se_ evil or always wrong.)

~~~
jgfoot
Adherence to arbitrary grammar rules is a signal. It shows that the writer has
training in what the rules are, and the ability to follow them. To some
readers, this can be a signal of credibility. I don't care if the rules make
sense; I care if someone will think less of my writing if I break the rules.

~~~
telemachos
People often reply something along these lines. I don't entirely disagree, but
I have some big reservations. First, which rules? That is, does it still
bother you if a writer uses 'will' where some very stuffy people would prefer
(even insist on!) 'shall'? If not, why not? If so, why? Notice that no matter
which way you jump on this, _you're already making choices_. What about
'nauseous' and 'nauseated'? Do you insist on that distinction in writing? How
about in speech? Do you correct people who say 'can' instead of 'may'? How
about 'less' and 'few'? Do you say 'your being here makes me happy' or 'you
being here makes me happy'? There's always going to be room for _some_
pedantic asshat to correct you. It's up to you, however, to pick the cases
where you push back, or shrug, or accept the correction quietly (because
you've had the fight too often). You also have to decide who you want to
impress. If you carefully rearrange all sentences so that they don't end with
a preposition, you may impress the grammar school teachers and the self-
satisfied pedants of the world, but you will only look silly to the professors
of Linguistics over at Language Log[1].

So it's not entirely good enough to say "Just follow the arbitrary rules in
order to demonstrate that you are a thoughtful, well-educated, intelligent
person." It's always a case of pick your rules and your battles.

~~~
imd
You have a [1] but forgot to include the footnote.

~~~
telemachos
Sorry about that. It's linked later in this thread, but still, here it is.

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/>

------
_delirium
I wonder if Wikipedia adopting that style has had any influence on its
popularity online, or if that's an example of convergent evolution. It was
decided way back in 2002 to use the logical punctuation style there, in a
fairly ad-hoc way when it was still a small project. Part of the motivation
appears to have been a sort of UK/US compromise. It's since been reworded
significantly, but this was the original style suggestion there (introduced on
August 23, 2002):

 _In most cases, simply follow the usual rules of English punctuation. A few
points where the Wikipedia may differ from usual usage follow._

 _With quotation marks, we suggest splitting the difference between American
and English usage._

 _Although it is not a rigid rule, it is probably best to use the "double
quotes" for most quotations, as they are easier to read on the screen, and use
'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations". This is the American
style._

 _When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside
or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within
the quotation marks. This is the British style._

~~~
joeyh
Like the two spaces after a sentence rule, the traditional quote style has
much to do with typesetting. And so in the monospaced, limited font, early
online setting, those rules were not very relevant, and were often ignored.
When it wasn't being overdiscussed. Waaay before Wikipedia.

Now, the programmer style is actually different from these. You'll
occasionally see a programmer write «He said "Foo.".»

------
rflrob
>When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style,
if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side,
they both replied, in essence: "How about never? Is never good for you?"

It seems to me the next logical question here is, "why not?" Just about the
only arguments in favor of "American" punctuation are tradition and some hazy
sense that periods outside qoutes look wrong, whereas the best argument for
logical punctuation is that the point of writing is to communicate clearly,
and logical punctuation is more clear at virtually no cost.

------
Derbasti
As a non-native speaker, this is one thing I found very irritating about
American English writing. It never made sense to me to put something in quotes
that is not part of the quote.

~~~
po
Having grown up in the American system, I have to confess that this has always
bothered me but I didn't realize that it was only American writing! I guess I
never noticed it when I read well-edited british source material.

Now that I know doing it the 'logical' way is also considered conventional,
I'm going to have a hard time doing it the American way anymore.

------
Goladus
Informal writing rarely features _narration_ to any significant degree, which
is where the so-called American Style is most "logical" to the extent that
we're even really talking about logic. In forums and email and texting, quotes
are usually either blocked-off text, or the quotes are used to specifically
emphasize an exact character string (often a single word).

Wikipedia is also generally not about narration, and quotes are usually meant
to be exact.

With narration, the goal is not to convey exactness rather to tell a story.
Interrupting a character's quote to insert ", he said," influences the
original meaning (if there even is such a thing) no matter where the
punctuation lies. But that's not important because specifying precisely what a
character said usually isn't the point of a story.

Furthermore, if you write your own sentence, and finish with quote of an
entire sentence, why isn't there a period for both sentences? Brian said,
"let's go.".

Looked at this way, it's easy to see why, given the choice, narrators would
choose the more aesthetically pleasing placement inside the quotation marks.

~~~
username3
Shouldn't it be: "Brian said, "[l]et's go.".?"?

~~~
merraksh
One too many question marks, imho. Shouldn't it be: "Brian said, "[l]et's
go."."?

------
jeffool
Now if only ISO 8601 date formatting would catch on... (yyyy-mm-dd)

~~~
furyg3
Also: 24h time with no timezones.

~~~
unwind
Why no timezones? Do you propose that all times always be given as 24-hour
UTC?

~~~
furyg3
Exactly. With international communication on the rise, it's best (IMHO) to do
away with the timezone concept, and just use one time format everywhere.

India is +5:30, Nepal is +5:45, California observes DST but Arizona doesn't...
the EU does, but they start and end DST a week before the US...

It's ridiculous.

The initial gut reaction against this is that people would hate waking up at
18:00 and going home at 8:00, but I think people would get used to this pretty
quickly. After all, we do this twice a year as it is.

~~~
Djehngo
Consider also that there is one hour per year which does not exist and one
hour per year which happens twice (at-least within the context of local time
if you live in an area with daylight savings)

There is also Namibia which used to lose hours in daylight savings time and
Bangladesh which had dst in 2009 then dropped it, this makes historical time
calculations tricky.

------
perlgeek
Just imagine a programming language where you have to write

    
    
        print "some text," function(), "moretext";
    

instead of

    
    
        print "some text", function(), "moretext";

~~~
getsat

      print "some text," function(), "moretext;"

~~~
InclinedPlane
print("some text," function(), "moretext;)"

~~~
powrtoch
Just looking at this make me physically uncomfortable.

------
javert
I think the American style looks better in non-fixed-width fonts, because it
looks much closer to the way actual handwriting should look: the comma or
period _underneath_ the quotation mark.

I suspect this is the reason people started doing it that way in the first
place.

And I suspect people started doing it that way on both sides of the Atlantic.
It's just that Britain ended up standardizing one way, America the other.
(Possibly yet another instance of English language usage evolving more quickly
in Britain than in America.)

I'd appreciate if anybody can confirm or deny this hypothesis. And I find it
disappointing that the Slate article has no historical treatment of the issue.

(Honestly, _both_ styles look weird to me in fixed-width fonts, which
basically arose in tandem with the modern computer.)

~~~
vorg
Computer fonts nowadays should be able to change ." and ". so the . is under
the " and ditto ," and ", so the , is under the "

~~~
bonzoesc
Somebody should totally engineer a font that does that; if Zapfino can have a
special ligature for "Zapfino," you could certainly make ones for '".', '",',
and '";'.

And yes, I just mixed punctuation styles. Period-in-quotes simply looks
better.

~~~
adrianN
I thought the font had a ligature for the string "Zapfino,". That was
confusing.

------
chris_j
I'm British and, when I was at school, we were taught that punctuation should
go inside the quotation mark. This was one of those horribly prescriptive
rules, the breaking of which was considered very wrong indeed. I'm surprised
that this article calls this "American Style", given my experiences.

I started ignoring the convention pretty when I started using computers
because, as the article says, it's hard to defend it on merits and it just
looks plain odd, especially in a fixed-width font.

~~~
frobozz
I'm British, and it's only in the last few years that I've heard of the
American compulsion to modify quotes by adding punctuation.

I'm glad it seems to be vanishing.

------
saulrh
I'm kind of surprised that this hasn't appeared in the news before, given how
important an issue it is for technical writing. After all, you don't tell
someone to delete a line in vi by typing "dd."

------
mrseb
As a British tech blogger who writes on American tech sites, I've spent a lot
of time arguing this particular subject with editors, copy editors, and proof
readers.

Grammar should help the reader, not hinder. Logical/readable grammar all the
way.

------
MatthewB
Good. I never quite understood why I was putting punctuation inside quotation
marks all these years, besides the fact that my teachers told me that it is
the right way.

Let me see how this feels when I use "logical punctuation".

Yes, that feels good.

~~~
kenjackson
As a teen I refused to put the punctuation in the quotes, because it felt
wrong to me. I wish I had a better articulation, or even knew that the British
did it the way I did. I had a teacher who consistently dinged me on it, but I
persisted. Finally I've been vindicated!

------
ars
I've been doing this for years despite knowing what it's "supposed" to be. I'm
glad to finally not be in the minority.

And I had no idea it had a name or that it was common outside the US.

------
wccrawford
Even though I have followed the 'proper' way all my life, I recently realized
that there are many instances where having the punctuation inside is
confusing. I now have absolutely no problem putting it on the outside when
it's less confusing.

I'm seriously considering putting it on the outside all the time now.

------
guelo
Well if we're going to start making English logical we have a lot of work to
do.

~~~
nodata
Simplified English has been around for a while, there's even a Wikipedia
language for it: <http://simple.wikipedia.org/>

iirc Lincoln was a big proponent of it.

~~~
hugh3
And it still hasn't caught on, which probably indicates that it never will.

Though actually, many of the differences between US and proper English
spellings come from Webster's attempts to rationalize the English language. It
didn't work.

------
DanielBMarkham
Weird.

Last week I just made a commitment to start doing this the "correct" way. I
find it's very difficult after years of programming, though.

Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to
capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps. The
inconsistency between caps drives me nuts, even though I know it's the "right"
way to do things.

It's fascinating to see topics like this kind of float around for months or
years and then suddenly become news items. Wonder if a shift is really
happening? Or is the story just noticing a trend in people making the same
mistakes?

~~~
Silhouette
> Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to
> capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps.

The "rules" for titles are particularly stupid.

A title is almost invariably distinguished in some other way. If it's a
heading, it is typically printed in bold if typeset and underlined if written
by hand. Citations are normally printed in italics when typeset and written
within quotation marks by hand.

Meanwhile, it has been shown beyond any doubt by now that Capitalising Every
Word Except a Few in Some Arbitrary Fashion Hurts Readability, which is
particularly damaging when you're talking about text that readers will often
want to scan at speed.

~~~
justincormack
Down in England title caps like that went out around the 1950s. Compare say
the UK Guardian with the New York Times and there is a huge readability
difference. US print newspaper design is very retro, like the UK was in the
nineteenth and early 20th century.

~~~
Silhouette
It's true that some of our newspapers here (I'm in England) have moved into
the new millenium with their headings, but alas quite a few textbooks and
business reports still languish in the typographical dark ages, even new ones.

As far as I can tell, title case is still one of those quaint ideas that you
teach in English classes at school because the syllabus says so, even though
it is an objectively inferior approach and is not particularly popular in real
world usage any more. (See also: Almost any comma usage when handwriting
letters or envelopes that you were taught as a child; not splitting an
infinitive, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, or ending a sentence with
a preposition; spelling out certain small integer numbers in full; and your
teacher's pet view of the Oxford comma.)

------
zwischenzug
Is there a recognised difference between:

The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

and

He said, "I've been outside".

?

To me, "logical" punctuation in the first case would be as written, and in the
second case would be:

He said, "I've been outside.".

indicating that both the enclosing and enclosed sentence is complete.

~~~
atakan_gurkan
Punctuation is supposed to remove ambiguities, and help you read and
understand more easily. In your example

He said, "I've been outside.".

the collection of punctuation marks does very little for making the sentence
more understandable, and (IMHO) looks ugly. The name "logical punctuation" is
just a name for the style, do not take the word "logical" too literally.

~~~
limmeau
Perhaps "compositional" would be more appropriate.

------
jrockway
Also according to the Internet, "you" is spelled "u". Everyone should adjust
their internal dictionaries so that u don't become an establishment sellout.

Personally, it makes sense for "scare quotes" to not contain punctuation, as
they are not complete sentences. But it doesn't make sense for direct quotes
to not contain punctuation, as in `He said, "Hello there".' He didn't say
"Hello there", he said "Hello there."

(It might seem logical to have two periods in that case, but it's ugly, so the
second one can just be omitted for maximum conciseness. That's why the period
goes inside the quotation marks. Similarly, it would be confusing and ugly to
pretend to end a sentence in the middle of a sentence, so quotes that are not
at the end of the sentence "end" with a comma. The period is a pretty strong
message to pause, and you don't want to overuse it.

IMO.)

~~~
_delirium
With the end-of-statement period, I agree you can make that case, but it's
done with other punctuation as well, since the American rule is more of a
typographical rule than a semantic one (you put low-on-the-line punctuation
before high-on-the-line punctuation).

For example:

    
    
      British: "I would not", he objected, "enjoy that".
      American: "I would not," he objected, "enjoy that."
    

The period is arguably part of the quoted statement as you say, but the comma
definitely isn't.

~~~
timknauf
The British style would actually include the period/full stop in this case,
since it's quoted speech and the quoted speech ends with a period.

~~~
RuadhanMc
Hence the "logical" bit. It's not logical to have the period or commas outside
of the quote if the quote actually includes a period or comma.

------
SeoxyS
It amuses me that an article about punctuation and typographic conventions
completely ignores the standard of using typographer’s quotes instead of inch
marks. “This,” instead of "this." Same goes for apostrophes versus foot marks.

As a graphic design student myself, I am quite snobbish about using perfect
typography. This includes proper quotation marks, as well as following the
rule of putting periods and commas within quotes. (I also follow the rules
religiously when it comes to en-dashes versus em-dashes and hyphens, and when
to uses spaces around them. I also make sure to only use a single space after
period.)

------
jenniart
This is something I've struggled with in my writing, especially as someone
who's done blogging and AP style writing for a news outlet... Sometimes I
write a sentence that might end in a question mark, which shouldn't be a part
of a quote and rather placing the punctuation mark outside of the quotes (or
inside for that matter) I end up completely re-working the sentence to avoid
the problem. But I would have to agree that it doesn't always make sense to
stick so firmly to that grammar rule. It's nice to see that I'm not alone in
that thought.

------
adambyrtek
I wonder what are your thoughts on the double-spacing after full stops. I find
it terrible, but I know projects who enforce this style in code comments.

~~~
redcap
You should only double-space if you use a typewriter.

If you use a computer to write your text, and especially if it's going online,
one space is all you should need to use.

~~~
zokier
Actually code comments is a rare place where double spacing would make sense,
as code in general is designed to be readable in fixed-width type.

------
pw
_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)." I don't doubt Feal, but the
appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that
we are simply accustomed to the style._

------
Groxx
Been doing it for years, never looked back. Quotes should delimit the quote,
your period is outside that quote. The closest I get is where a comma _would_
work in a quote, and the writing interjects the speaker. e.g., "Grab that,"
foo barred, "and get over here", because "Grab that", foo barred, ", and get
over here" is fugly.

------
StuffMaster
Yeah, I thought the period-inside-quotes thing was stupid and only used it
when I had to for school. Stupid stupid stupid.

------
stretchwithme
I've been ignoring that rule for a long time. If it wasn't in the original, it
doesn't go in quotes.

And another thing. Using "an" when a word starts an H is followed very
inconsistently. In fact, I only seem to hear it in the phrase "an historic".
"An human" doesn't really speak that way.

~~~
cageface
An herb? An hour? An horchata?

~~~
hugh3
Incidentally, the soft h on "herb" is one of the things that bugs me most
about American English (and it took me several years of living here to even
figure out that it was consistently done that way).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Americans pronounce a hard "h" on
"herbivore"? How does "herb", then, lose its h?

~~~
cageface
I actually say "erbivore", as do most people I know.

~~~
hugh3
Really? Oh, in that case it's at least consistent (though it still bugs me,
for no particularly good reason other than that it's unusual).

What about the name "Herb"?

~~~
cageface
I don't know any personally but I usually hear the H enunciated in the name.
But Herb is short for "Herbert", which is a German name, so maybe we inherited
the pronunciation rule there.

------
blahblahblah
Of course the period should follow the quotation marks. Periods, exclamation
marks, and question marks are the delimiters for English sentences and belong
at the end in the same way that a semicolon belongs at the end of a line in
C/C++.

------
Locke1689
The resolution here seems obvious to me: when you find yourself in a bike shed
conversation, go with the standard. If, however, one option or the other is
preferable for some practical reason, choose that option.

------
stcredzero
Try writing a parser that recognizes punctuation inside the quotes, then try
to write one that recognizes it outside. It's quite clear that the latter is
cleaner and simpler.

------
benarent
is it me or is this site using <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)>
"" instead of quotation marks? “ ” .

------
Muzza
A recent development in Swedish - at least in online communications - is the
use of the French manner of putting a bloody space in front of exclamation
marks ! Looks awful.

------
DannoHung
The Chicago Manual of Style can go jump in a ditch. American style is terrible
and should be abandoned immediately.

