There are two different schools of thought in this.
(1) The generally used style in the U.S. is to always put commas and full stops (periods) inside the closing quotation mark.
(2) The style widely used outside the U.S., which is to put the comma or full stop inside the quotation mark if it belongs with the word(s) being quoted, and outside otherwise.
I prefer (2), but when I’m writing for work my boss tells me that I have to follow (1).
The second is preferred for US style. I don’t know any American style guide that prefers the first, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one exists (I’d guess especially in a style guide for technical, computer-oriented work.) But your major manuals of style (Chicago, AP, MLA, etc.) all put the comma within the quotation mark in your case.
I’m editing a book of contributions from different authors, all of whom use different styles. Therefore I had to pick a style to make the usage consistent.
I would have liked to put the comma outside the quotes after reading some sentences that were like your example a, but that made some others look bad. I finally decided I had to go with standard American style, which is your example 2.*
I would have edited that to make it consistent, too.
I think this is correct in British English. This is a list of descriptions given at different times. You’re quoting the individual descriptions, which are separated by commas.
I think this is incorrect. If it were the report of a single sentence, you’d write, “She described her ex-husband as a cad, a beast, and a Neanderthal, but really great in the sack.”
However, you could have, “He’s a bounder,” Eric wheezed, “a scoundrel,” he wheezed again, “and a cad.” See the difference?
<rant>
(Not directed at the OP, but at grammar nitpicking in general)
Questions like these always bug me. We’re taught from an early age that there’s a certain correct way to write in English, but the teachers neglect to tell us, of course, that there is no central authority on the language.
Commas were inside yesterday and tomorrow they’ll be out. Two spaces after a sentence or one? How many commas in a list of three? Maybe the more important question is who cares?
What we learn as the hard-and-fast rules of grammar are really just weighty traditions passed on within certain subgroups of English speakers. Who’s to say one style is any more valid than another? In the real world, proper usage is determined only by popularity: English evolves through votes of usage, and if you prefer one over the other, just keep using it and convince enough others to do the same and it’ll eventually become the new de facto standard.
It’s how words enter the dictionary, how slang eventually goes mainstream, and how ghetto speakers, uneducated masses, interdweebs, and rebels without causes liberate themselves from the tyranny of elitist syntax – and perhaps eventually even make it come around.
“Hear ye, hear ye! What I have to say is far more important than anything you could possibly imagine because I can write like the Dead White Guys of Olde – but not too olde!” :rolleyes:
As long as you can communicate the information effectively, does it really matter whether a comma is one space over to the right?
</rant>
That leads to a different conclusion, though. By using the quotes they way they were in the original, it is made clear that the (for want of a better term) reporter is using the actual words used by the original speaker. In your rewrite, the reporter could be paraphrasing.
Another thing that the original tells you is that the original words may not have been spoken in that order, all together like that, or even at the same time.
As we’ve said in a million threads, style is not grammar. Spelling is not grammar. Usage is not grammar. Grammar really does have rules. The rest have conventions and standards. It is not true that “the hard-and-fast rules of grammar are really just weighty traditions passed on within certain subgroups of English speakers.” You’re using grammar incorrectly. And that’s not just a style error. You’re falsifying the entire meaning of your sentence.
Why are there conventions and standards and giant books that try to make sense of them? Because consistency in style makes the information easier to understand. Not harder. Easier. Internal inconsistencies lead to stumbles and bumps, re-reads and mistakes. The readers’ minds, consciously or unconsciously, have to stop and try to parse the new information when it’s presented in a different style than the identical information a few pages earlier. As I said, I’m editing the work of several dozen writers. When you encounter the numerous differences back to back you completely understand why style guides exist.
It’s true that no one style guide can be preferred over any other because it is “better” or “truer” or “more correct.” You can even combine styles from several guides to make an internal style guide. I’ve had publishers who have done this. What matters is that you are internally consistent. That’s why professional publications have editors and copyeditors. Consistency is as important in words as it is in math.
Conventions and standards change. The requirement of consistency doesn’t. It is fixed.
So what are the rules of grammar and who sets them?
Consistency as an ideal is fine, but in the real world, when excess attachment to that ideal serves as little more than a class divide among the properly grammatucated and the not, maybe it’s time to consider how we can phrase our speech less ambiguously instead of relying upon little squiggly symbols here and there.
Like the laws of physics, the rules of grammar are observed, not set.
It is grammatical to put modifiers in a certain order. They “sound right” to a native speaker of the language. I can say grammatically “the dark red car.” But if I say “red dark the car,” I am no longer speaking in a way that a native speaker of English would find grammatical.
In general, each country has a committee (usually government, often private) that sets the grammar rules. In the US, for example, we have 2: the American Psychology Association (APA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA.) To a lesser extent, Webster’s Dictionary also affects language. The grammar associations can’t ignore slang if it’s in Webster’s, for example.
However, everybody accepts that language is alive and always changing, and that grammar rules are just our closest approximation of how native speakers use the language. If native speakers change over time, the grammar rules must change as well.
Therefore, it’s the people that create language, and the rules are made after the fact to reflect it as best as possible.
The APA and the MLA really only prescribe style for the publications of their respective associations. However, because they have put together comprehensive and consistent style guides, other authors and publishers can decide to follow them.
But that’s it. They are only “official” within their associations, they only set standards for written materials, and they aren’t comprehensive works on English vocabulary or grammar.
There is no official body prescribing English vocabulary or grammar in the same way as the Académie française does for the French language: it’s what native English speakers say or write, as recorded by dictionary makers and grammarians. That means there can be disagreements about important issues, like whether commas go inside quotation marks, or whether you should say “England defeats Australia” or “England defeat Australia” in a headline about a cricket match.
Any of the above may express a preference for American or British English or this or that style guide, or may make things up out of whole cloth.
Note that your posts follow generally accepted capitalization practices. Despite your rant, on an intuitive level you seem to be writing to your audience’s expectations (Dopers).
I was taught the comma-inside-quotes rule, but I consider it so illogical I choose to ignore it. My dream is that others will do the same and that “rule” will eventually fade away.
Here’s my “rule”: Anything inside quotes or parentheses is a unit. Within, punctuate as makes sense for the unit in isolation. Punctuate everything else as if the unit were just a single word. If this means that your sentence ends with [.".], that’s OK; it makes sense.
I don’t regard the question of the location of the comma as grammar at all. As I understand it, the issue derives from typographic convention, and placing the comma within quotation marks was only done to improve the visual look of the typeset word. So long as we have a clear consistent style, we know without ambiguity what the sentence means. Indeed in this particular case there is no ambiguity at all. We know a-priori that the commas belong either inside or outside, and we should never see a mix. So in a sense we have a single lexeme ," or ", depending upon typographic convention that means <end of quotation plus list separator>
One problem with the examples above is that we don’t enunciate commas. It makes no sense to distinguish between “a cad,” and “a cad” - unless you wish to express the idea that the speaker paused. Which is using the comma in a different sense than a list separator anyway. If you place commas in the quoted text to indicate list breaks, you are adding something not in spoken language. If you are quoting written language, it can be come messy. It makes little sense to include a comma at the end of a quoted fragment, but quoting a full sentence is almost ambiguous. If the stop is inside the quotation marks we can only determine if the stop is part of the quotation, or a stop for the sentence, by observing whether a new sentence starts. It remains unambiguous, but makes computer geeks queezy.
You’re exaggerating the extent of the “problem” you’re highlighting.
I’ve been reading for over half a century, and I don’t ever recall at time in the U.S. when commas and periods fell outside of quotations marks. (It is true that this is the convention in Europe, but I’m guessing it’s been equally consistent there.)
Two spaces after a period dates from the time mere mortals (as opposed to professional typesetters for publication) produced their work on typewriters, which generally featured monospaced characters (i.e., an “i” was just as wide as an “m”).
With the development of variable-spaced characters on computers, the two spaces after a period were no longer necessary (and looked damn ugly to boot). Thus, this is an example of the logical “evolution” of the written word you speak of later in your post.
In newspapers and magazines, at least, my experience is that a comma after the initial entry only in a list of three is pretty standard. I’m not sure if that’s universally the case in literature.
As far as “who cares?” – I do, as should anyone whose purpose in writing is for the reader to easily understand his or her efforts. As another poster correctly noted, inconsistency causes stumbles and pauses.
I’ve been accused of being unnecessarily alarmist in the course of similar discussions in the past, but I generally fall into the “that way lies chaos” school of thought when it comes to a laissez faire attitude toward spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.
I have seen too many real-world examples of a lack of care in these areas causing real-world problems in understanding – problems that could have easily been avoided if the writers had not gone into it with that attitude.
Beyond this, sloppiness in any of these areas still does affect one’s perception of the writer. You can rail about the injustice of this all you want, but I form an immediate opinion of the intelligence level of a writer (or a poster) based on the degree of attention he or she pays to spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.
I don’t apologize for this. Anyone can make a careless mistake – God knows I have, and do – but if such mistakes are rampant, it says something.
The problem with inconsistency is that it slows down reading and lessens clarity. I hate, hate, hate that we dropped the terminal comma. I often have to go back and re-scan a sentence.
I grew up reading books from England, as well as the US, so I get especially confused.
All the writers, teachers, editors, pundits, pedants, and poets of the last 500 years have been trying to produce speech that is less ambiguous. And the result is so bad that you see need to complain about it. So what’s your “real world” solution?
Not relying on little squiggly symbols is the wrong way to go. Nobody knows what is in anybody else’s head. Every additional cue and clue to meaning is positively helpful. We need more of them, not fewer. This is like arguing that posts should be perfectly understandable without smilies. That’s never true, either.
As for the class divide between the “grammatucated and the not,” well, read a thousand posts here. Calculate the value of the posts by those who can compose a coherent sentence in recognizable standard English and those who can’t. We get lots of posts from people who can’t be bothered with the little squiggly stuff. And you know what? They’re collectively worth almost nothing. Posting is communicating. If you can’t write you can’t communicate.
You don’t have to use formal English. You don’t have to get every word spelled correctly (although spell checking takes only a second) or every comma properly placed (although the serial comma is the way to go, baby). You do have to be coherent enough to get your point across to total strangers. That’s much, much harder than you seem to think it is.
