Grammar 101: Punctuation, Part 3

[green_grrl]

Welcome to the final Grammar 101 post on Punctuation.

Comments

[writinginct]

I never knew that bit about indenting text quoted from another source. Cool.

Thanks for another awesome write up!! :)

[green_grrl]

Thank you!

[randomfreshink]

It's worth noting that for punctuation, there are different style guides that will give you different information. Punctuation is often about style. Personally, I like the Chicago Manual of Style, too, but since styles do change, the editions may vary as to punctuation style choices. (I'm always amused at what's in fashion in UK fiction, as they often seem to just generally dislike punctuation.) The main thing there is to pick the style guide you want to use, and be consistent.

[green_grrl]

I'm expecting any edition now for Chicago to go with periods and commas outside quotation marks for uses other than dialogue. Are there any American style guides that do? Chicago did finally change on punctuation with bold and italics: the punctuation mark should now reflect its sense in the sentence, not blindly reflect the word before it. (YAY!!!! <--Grammar geek is excited!)

[pinkpolarity]

I don't know if the actual style *guide* has it that way, but APA abstractors are expected to use period-outside-quotes when writing abstracts. Which really messed me up when I was first starting to write fiction.

[green_grrl]

That would mess me up, too, but it really does make more sense! I know it's become very common in technical writing, in order to most accurately reflect the directions; e.g., Click "Standard install", click "OK", and let the installer run. There is no comma on the actual OK button, so the tech writer doesn't show the comma within the quotation marks describing the button. It's probably a similar case for APA abstracts--only show actual, exact quotes inside quotation marks.

[rhiannon_black]

An en dash is also used in American typesetting to replace a hyphen in compound words when they are set all caps. This is purely for aesthetic reasons. An en dash usually sits higher above the baseline than the hyphen and is wider than the hyphen as well.

[green_grrl]

Ah, my Chicago doesn't have that one-they're usually so good about typesetting info, too. Thanks!