In my Business Writing class last night, I covered the basics of sentence-ending punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation marks). When you throw quotation marks into the mix, things get complicated.
The rule I was trying to get across to my class is this: if the actual quotation or phrase uses end punctuation, the quotation marks come after the end punctuation. For example:
I want to watch “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”
The item in quotations, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? contains a question mark. So the quotation marks come after the question mark.
When the quote or phrase in quotes doesn’t have sentence-ending punctuation within it, then the quotes come before the sentence- ending punctuation. Example:
I want to watch “Mad Men”.
I found out after class that this is not the American punctuation rule. In the United States, we should be writing that sentence as:
I want to watch “Mad Men.”
What sense does that make? The textbooks I used (published in the United States) describe the period is outside of the quotation marks in my first “Mad Men” example.
So, why the discrepancy? Thanks to Google, I found this interesting explanation written by Mark Israel on alt-usage-english.org:
According to William F. Phillips (wfp@world.std.com), in the days when printing used raised bits of metal, “.” and “,” were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of
type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above)
if they had a ‘”‘ on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence
the convention arose of always using ‘.”‘ and ‘,”‘ rather than ‘”.’ and ‘”,’, regardless of logic.
Fowler was a strong advocate of logical placement of punctuation
marks, i.e. only placing them inside the quotation marks if they
were part of the quoted matter. This scheme has gained ground,
and is especially popular among computer users, and others who
wish to make clear exactly what is and what is not being quoted.
Logical placement is accepted by many more publishers outside than
inside the U.S.
Some people insist that ‘.”‘ and ‘,”‘ LOOK better, but Fowler
calls them “really mere conservatives, masquerading only as
aesthetes”.
I agree with Fowler: punctuation rules should be logical. There are many things that were done different in the days of manual typesetting and manual typewriters that were done so keys or type wouldn’t break (QWERTY keyboard, anyone?).
Now that we don’t have to deal with these mechanical limitations, I say it’s time to be logical about punctuation. If there is punctuation in the quote, it goes inside the quotation marks. Otherwise, it belongs outside. The fact that my textbook resources also state it that way tells me that the old rule is in flux and right now is considered a matter of style.
Like the dash between “e” and “mail”, this old American punctuation rule will probably be replaced in a short matter of years.
