A serious talk about a serious issue.

[alexandraerin]

When 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:

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.

Comments

[jibb.livejournal.com]

I'm all for logical placement of commas and quotation marks.

If you already know this, or prefer your double-hyphen "poor man's dash", feel free to ignore the following:

In HTML (and thus LJ and Wordpress), you can get em dashes—like these—by typing —.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Most word processors will autocorrect -- into a dash, so it's just natural for me to use the keystrokes.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Oooh, you've caught me out. I agree it's illogical -- and chafed against it for ages! -- but it just looks weird whenever I see it otherwise. I am sorry. I am impure.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Well, at least you tried to resist.

[andy9306.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It doesn't come up often but every once in a while someone on the internet will try to enforce this "rule", to my infinite annoyance.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Set my commas free!

[brenda-ea.livejournal.com]

I think it might also be that people don't realize quotes are different from dialogue.

When he said "I need to go", she was sad.

"I need to go," he said. She was sad.


This thing with punctuation and quotes at the end of dialogue is one of the most common mistakes I have to point out when giving feedback on fanfics at a forum I'm a member of. I can see where, if people don't GET it in the first place, having to do it two opposite ways would not make sense for them!

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I was going to post something about dialogue being different - thanks for doing it for me! But, while I know that that's how the comma should work in dialogue (and also have to correct it a lot), I don't feel I understand *why* it should work like that. Do you happen to know?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Think of it as part of the quote. If the quote didn't stream into a dialogue tag,(," she said.) you'd put a period there and the period would naturally be inside the quotation marks since the stop is occurring as part of the speech.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Ah, got it, thanks. So the full-stop that belongs with the spoken words is being postponed until the dialogue tag is over. Maybe... but if it's:

"Look at that!", he said excitedly.

then I get confused. Should that comma be there, or not? We certainly can't postpone the exclamation mark to the end of the sentence.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

No, the full stop that belongs to the spoken words is being replaced by a comma, to stop the speech tag from looking all orphaned.

There's no comma in the example you're posting. It's just

"Quote!" he quoted.

[calianissene.livejournal.com]

As a dabbler in creative writing, a college student who is still required to write research papers, and a self-professed grammar nazi, this gives me something to think about. Logically, it makes more sense to place the comma outside the quotations. However, I think it's just been beaten into my head so badly that I can't NOT see it as "wrong".

Damn you, logic! You've already taken Santa and the tooth fairy away from me; can't you just leave my grammar alone? :P

[moofable.livejournal.com]

You will never convert me to your heathen way.

[ophe1ia-in-red.livejournal.com]

I always thought that was a very odd conceit of US English. Now I know where it came from. Thanks!

[carsonfiles.livejournal.com]

How funny--I completely agree with you here. (In an earlier chapter of MU, I corrected an "alright" & was chastised for it. Still don't agree with you there but am shutting up about it!)

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Heh. Funnily enough, the "style guide" I sent my proofreader for The Gift of the Bad Guy consisted of two items, the comma thing and "'alright' is so a word".