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A serious talk about a serious issue.
Feb. 8th, 2011 01:05 amWhen I was learning how to type, I was taught to double-space after a period, a convention that dates back to the days of typewriters and computers with monowidth fonts and one-size-fits-all spaces. A lot of people learned to type that way, and many still do, even though the internet tends to strip it out when rendering their output.
It is no longer the convention, though. People aren't taught to type that way anymore.
So I ask my fellow Americans: why are we still putting commas inside quotes that they don't belong to? Because if my friend the internet is to be believed, this is likewise an artifact of obsolete technology.
If you have a sentence that has a "phrase in quotes", like this, that occurs right before a comma... why should the quotes swallow the comma? The comma is not part of the quote. What the quotation marks signify is that the contents are exact and literal. They should be the same no matter where they're placed. The comma is a part of the structure of the sentence as a whole, not a part of the structure of the phrase.
In my experience, computer science folks and mathematicians get this. A lot of people who don't have much formal training in writing get it. And people who have formal training in writing outside the United States get it. It's obvious and intuitive. Once someone understands the structure of a sentence, they don't have to be taught this. Putting the comma inside the quotes, on the other hand, goes against natural inclinations. It has to be beaten into people's heads. In my opinion, that's probably why it's taken so long for this aberrant rule to die. It's a combination of cognitive dissonance--"I wouldn't have learned to go along with something so obviously wrong if it weren't actually right, would I?"--and sheer cussedness of the "I learned to put up with this and so can you!" variety.
See how I put the question mark and exclamation points inside those quote-enclosed sentences? That's because they're part of the material being quoted. They belong to the quote. Now, I've got my poor man's dash there, the double hyphen. Let's try remixing this a little:
See that? The dash inside the quotes? See how absurd that is?
Well, that is what you're doing. When you put a comma inside a quote, you're doing the same thing. It doesn't belong there. It just doesn't.
So why do we put them there?
Laziness.
No, really.
Not ours, though. According to this post... which astonishingly enough acknowledges the illogicalness of the rule, examines the origins of the rule in a footnote, and still somehow concludes that it's proper. Any sensible discussion of how and why we ended up in this state of affairs would end with all involved realizing the so-called "rule" has been utterly discredited and should never be taught or enforced again.
It was printers, you see. In the days of hand-set typing, the smallest pieces were the most prone to being knocked out of position when they ended a line, so printers would tuck them inside other punctuation when possible. It wasn't that they always got knocked out of alignment. Printers outside the U.S. apparently had a good enough success rate that they did not throw out the actual meaning of the punctuation, the established rules regarding it, and all semblance of logic and reasoning in order to avoid the chance of error.
But our illustrious forebears? They were lazy
And for the time being, it seems we're stuck with their mistake.
Well, some of us are. I'm not. This is one of the smaller but still very precious perks of the way I manage my career. I don't have to be bound by the mistakes of past generations or the limitations of past technology. And this is the hill I will die upon: no work of mine will ever be published that follows such an outdated and erroneous convention.
It is no longer the convention, though. People aren't taught to type that way anymore.
So I ask my fellow Americans: why are we still putting commas inside quotes that they don't belong to? Because if my friend the internet is to be believed, this is likewise an artifact of obsolete technology.
If you have a sentence that has a "phrase in quotes", like this, that occurs right before a comma... why should the quotes swallow the comma? The comma is not part of the quote. What the quotation marks signify is that the contents are exact and literal. They should be the same no matter where they're placed. The comma is a part of the structure of the sentence as a whole, not a part of the structure of the phrase.
In my experience, computer science folks and mathematicians get this. A lot of people who don't have much formal training in writing get it. And people who have formal training in writing outside the United States get it. It's obvious and intuitive. Once someone understands the structure of a sentence, they don't have to be taught this. Putting the comma inside the quotes, on the other hand, goes against natural inclinations. It has to be beaten into people's heads. In my opinion, that's probably why it's taken so long for this aberrant rule to die. It's a combination of cognitive dissonance--"I wouldn't have learned to go along with something so obviously wrong if it weren't actually right, would I?"--and sheer cussedness of the "I learned to put up with this and so can you!" variety.
See how I put the question mark and exclamation points inside those quote-enclosed sentences? That's because they're part of the material being quoted. They belong to the quote. Now, I've got my poor man's dash there, the double hyphen. Let's try remixing this a little:
It's a combination of cognitive dissonance--"I wouldn't have learned to go along with something so obviously wrong if it weren't actually right, would I?--"and sheer cussedness
See that? The dash inside the quotes? See how absurd that is?
Well, that is what you're doing. When you put a comma inside a quote, you're doing the same thing. It doesn't belong there. It just doesn't.
So why do we put them there?
Laziness.
No, really.
Not ours, though. According to this post... which astonishingly enough acknowledges the illogicalness of the rule, examines the origins of the rule in a footnote, and still somehow concludes that it's proper. Any sensible discussion of how and why we ended up in this state of affairs would end with all involved realizing the so-called "rule" has been utterly discredited and should never be taught or enforced again.
It was printers, you see. In the days of hand-set typing, the smallest pieces were the most prone to being knocked out of position when they ended a line, so printers would tuck them inside other punctuation when possible. It wasn't that they always got knocked out of alignment. Printers outside the U.S. apparently had a good enough success rate that they did not throw out the actual meaning of the punctuation, the established rules regarding it, and all semblance of logic and reasoning in order to avoid the chance of error.
But our illustrious forebears? They were lazy
And for the time being, it seems we're stuck with their mistake.
Well, some of us are. I'm not. This is one of the smaller but still very precious perks of the way I manage my career. I don't have to be bound by the mistakes of past generations or the limitations of past technology. And this is the hill I will die upon: no work of mine will ever be published that follows such an outdated and erroneous convention.
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