Pet peeve

[marinav]

Upon moving to this country, I made the transition from the metric system (and it hurt). I went from writing "$3,50" to "$3.50" with somewhat lesser pain. But what really gets me and drives me batty is the use of punctuation inside quotation marks, American style. Having been primarily educated in Europe, I was taught the British/European style

Comments

[anagramatica]

Some of us don't follow those style manuals! The Chicago style is what I use, and was allowable for my thesis. I guess my view is, it's called "style" for a reason. It's a fashion. Of course, professors tend to believe so much in their own sense of fashion that nothing else could possibly be correct. Here's what The Chicago Manual of Style says:

6.8 Periods and Commas. Periods and commas precede closing quotation marks, whether double or single. This is a traditional style, in use well before the first edition of this manual.[...]In the kind of textual studies where retaining the original placement of a comma in relation to closing quotation marks is essential to the author's argument and scholarly integrity, the alternative system described in 6.10 could be used...

6.9 Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points. Unlike periods and commas, these all follow closing quotation marks unless a question mark or and exclamation point belongs within the quoted matter.

Take, for example, the first line of "To a Skylark": "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!"
I was asked to state my "name and serial number"; I have no serial number.
Which of Shakespeare's characters said, "All the world's a stage"?
"Where are you from?"
"Watch out!"

6.10 Alternative System. According to what is sometimes called the British style (set forth in The Oxford Guide to Style [the successor to Hart's Rules; see bibliog. 1.1]), a style also followed in other English-speaking countries, only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks....

[marinav]

Cool. Looks like Chicago Style has it together. :o) You're right about it just being a "fashion" so to speak. All the more reason to go with what is logical, rather than someone else's sense of fashion.