From the Ninth Edition (2001) of the Gregg Reference Manual:
I have attempted to follow this rule (American) since I read it ca. 2001, but I have noticed very few publications or amateur writers seem to follow it as slavishly as I. The trend, as I have observed, is to put all punctuation where it logically should go (i.e., after the quotes if it’s not a part of the actual quote), ignoring the ugly appearance of a mark some distance way from the associated text. Perhaps a later edition of this manual will be (or has been) updated to reflect usage change, or perhaps my observation is faulty.
Some style guides at some times do indeed suggest that the best approach would be to rewrite a sentence.
Nevertheless, they have to provide rules for the cases in which the sentence, for whatever reason, cannot be rewritten. One of the reasons style manuals are so freaking huge is that they try to cover all the weird little points that send people streaking to a style manual, like the sentence “Have you ever read the story “Who goes there?”?”
First place, don’t call me “Shirley,” Second place, this is a child’s “Why?”–we can’t change the rules, because there is no “we.” If everyone changes the rules he or she doesn’t want, then we’ve lost the entire set of conventions that make English comprehensible to all. What “we” MIGHT do is to institute a new rule by persuading the authorities to adopt it, which normally takes at least a long weekend to accomplish.
Of course, everyone has one or two bugbears and usually we violate conventions here or there, putting commas outside quotation marks or spelling “whiskey” as “uiski” or whatever, and maybe your slob of a small-town paper’s editor will let it slide but usually, it will get corrected by any half-competent editor, and that is that. So go nuts, violate standard conventions as you will, and get away with it where you can. No skin off my ass, unless you happen to be in my graduate seminar or are submitting your article to the academic press I edit, in which case, it’s my way or the highway. And good luck persuading anyone to get your bugbear changed–it happens every few years that someone wages a campaign and the AP stylebook or the Chicago Manual or the MLA reverses itself on something or other, but if I were setting out on such a journey, I’d definitely pack lunch.
No, we ARE the authorities. We, as in everyone who uses the language. And if we change how we use the language, then the language changes. That’s how languages work.
And yes, it’s also part of how languages work that the people who use a language have to understand how other people use it. Which is all the more reason why the rules should be logical, so they’re easier to understand.
Yeah, it usually takes a few centuries, sometimes it happens over decades if you’re very lucky. So get everyone united behind the thing that pisses you off the most, and you’ll get Fs in school, and blue-penciled (and thought an immature anti-authoritarian numbskull) by every editor in this hemisphere, and work REAL hard at it for the rest of your life, and maybe, just maybe, your grandkids will be able to put commas outside the quotation marks. That’s what “WE” can accomplish. Maybe.
Or you could just go with the conventional way of placing punctuation and pay attention to the contents of whatever it is you’re attempting to write rather than the niceties.
Yeah, but language change rarely happens by a concerted effort to make that change. And when it does, it very often doesn’t stick for long. Yes, there is a current trend toward more inclusive language, and I hope it is one of those rare times when we can get together behind a common purpose and change things for good.
But some general feeling that language should be “more logical”? You’re tilting at windmills.
Thank you for finding that. It has been my guide to effective communication in the written form for the past half century. To my amazement the arbiters of intellectual governance still proffer college degrees upon people who have not mastered the skills enumerated in that venerable instrument.
I’ll only get Fs in school for it if I have teachers who are bound and determined to avoid teaching. I mean, I teach math, not English, but the hardest part of my job is convincing students that “because the rules say so, and it’s not supposed to make sense” is absolutely the wrong approach. I guess part of the reason that part of my job is so hard is because they have other teachers who are telling them that garbage.
I’m outraged that you’ve put the quotation marks in my article where you have–I demand that you instantly place them back where I had them, or else I will refuse to allow you to publish my fine work. I have spoken. Selah!!
I’m sure you meant that sarcastically. But one of my greatest moments teaching was when some students in one of my classes spontaneously decided that 0 = 9, and started exploring the implications of that. Do you know what the full extent of my involvement in that was? I pointed out that it was perfectly valid to do that, but that it’s more interesting if you use a prime number like 7 or 11. And so they instead decided that 0 = 7, and explored the implications of that, instead. Because you can in fact do perfectly valid math starting from assumptions like that. And a student who takes the time to explore that is going to become much better at math, any kind of math, than a student who just blindly recites “2+2=4” because that’s what the rule says.
Likewise with your English classes. The style guide you’re using is not the One True Way, nor is it unchanging. Sooner or later, they’re going to see other style guides, or even later versions of the same style guide, and they’re going to tell them to write things differently than you did. And if you’ve taught them that any deviation from your style guide means an F, then they’re not going to look at those different style guides and say “I have to follow these different completely arbitrary rules now”. They’re going to look at it and say “That’s wrong, teacher said so”. You’re training students to not be able to follow any style guide at all.
Completely ass backwards. I explain ALL the style guides, their rare disagreements, and tell them which one we’re going to practice mastering in this course. I add that after the course, they’ll probably use several different ones, but here they’ll learn how to begin remembering what one of them dictates. The sooner they begin committing one to memory, the less reliant they’ll need to be on consulting it eighteen times per paragraph but every writer needs to start by remembering some basics. You know, sort of like remembering that hateful fascist multiplication table.
What Chronos is (deliberately?) misunderstanding here is that a) the conventions he’s railing against–punctuation, spelling, rules of sentence construction–are trivial in the context of learning how to write, on the freshman level or on the graduate or professional level, and b) are wasteful of everyone’s time debating their fairness or logic–they are what they are, and c) some of them will inevitably seem or even be illogical or in conflict with other conventions, so it’s useful to learn some of these and their arbitrary-seeming resolutions in the course of becoming a clear writer. That is the goal of learning how to write: acquiring clarity of form so you may express your content to others, and by refusing to follow agreed-upon conventions, you introduce a lack of clarity into your writing.
To take Chronos’ rather silly hill that he chooses to die on, a reader seeing quotation marks used in his preferred “wrong” place, has to stop reading and wonder why the quotation marks are being used contrary to convention here. Is Chronos affecting British usage to make some sort of statement about geopolitics? Is this odd usage restricted only to certain speakers in Chronos’ work, or does he apply it to all of his speakers? Does he flout other conventions or only this one? Perhaps he’s simply uneducated as to the conventional placement? Or maybe this is a firm expression of pro-British thought more generally? Or is he simply rebelling against convention?
I would probably conclude that the latter is the explanation, but it’s a burden (assuming I take Chronos seriously as a writer) to have to do all this wondering. Multiply it by a thousand, for all the conventional uses in English that Chronos could choose to have a problem with, and you can see how having and using the standard way of presenting your prose aids the reader hoping to understand the substance of your writing.
Occasionally, of course, you do get writers doing odd and unconventional things–James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy come to mind for their unconventional ways of presenting speech–but we grant great writers their quirks, in the context of all the wisdom they impart. And of course great writers understand perfectly the rules they’re violating–I sought to teach my students what those rules and conventions are, and what they’re risking by inventing their own.
And I never had nearly enough time in a term to teach all the serious, complicated things they needed to know about ways to construct sentences, paragraphs and arguments, so I certainly wanted to waste as little time as possible on Chronos’ childish “But WHY I gotta do it this way, teacher?” whining.
I’m actually not understanding what the big disagreement between you and Roger_That is because it largely seems to me you’re advocating similar things: explain the concept of a style guide. Explain what they do and how they differ, and how their rules are not immutable. And I assume follow them in the context they are meant for.
But rules being logical in language is a tricky proposition. The guidelines all have a logic behind them, eventually. Which “logic” is correct? For example, in standard English, we don’t like double negation. In non-standard English and a lot of other languages, “negative agreement” is logical and correct. “I ain’t got nothing” or, in standard Polish, “nie mam nic” (lit., “I don’t have nothing.” You wouldn’t phrase that using “something” to my knowledge, to avoid a double negative. Same with Hungarian: “Nincs semmin.”) Trying to reduce language to a universally agreed-up set of “logical” or “mathematical” rules seems like a fool’s errand to me. Why is the “logic” of avoiding double negation any more logical than the logic of negative agreement?
And that’s just one example. Your punctuation example makes sense in a type of logic, but just looks distractingly awful to my eyes and interrupts the flow of reading the sentence. Now if your way had been previously established and I grew up with that way being “logical,” perhaps it would not interrupt my parsing, but, as it stands, any change from accepted standards will be jarring.
Regarding the ‘who goes there’ example, let’s say we render the title in italics, instead of using quotation marks.
Would we then say:
Have you read Who Goes There??
Obviously not. It’s absurd, logic be damned. There might be some sort of absolutist algorithmic justification for the above, parsing out the language particle by particle, but no sane human would smoothly and cleanly interpret the sentence without a mental hiccup.
Communication, including writing, is about communication. There is a thought, idea, or concept held by one party, and this party wishes to transmit this to one or more other parties. The logical form of this transmission is meaningful, but it is also secondary.
And to illustrate this, I have deliberately embedded in this post a structural example which demonstrates how communication can be effective even where a supposedly strict rule is violated. Did you spot it?
It looks to me as though you’re making one of two mistakes.
Either you’re expecting other subjects (i.e. a human, evolved language like English) to work the way mathematics works, where everything is logically derived (and those other teachers you decry may have been making the reverse mistake)…
Or you’re forgetting that, like the way English is written, the way math is written is full of arbitrary rules and mutually-agreed-upon conventions. What would you tell a student who argued that, logically, the symbol 9 should mean negative six, or one-sixth, because it’s 6 upsode-down?