I’m completely unsure what to do about full stops (periods, for Americans and other aliens) at the end of short passages (not necessarily paragraphs as such - some of them are more like little extracts) of text on my website…
Here’s the problem:
I know it’s fairly common practice to leave off full stops on short pieces of text
Many of these short passages comprise more than one sentence. Ending the first sentence with a full stop, but omitting the one at the end feels weird
But many of them terminate with a link - including the full stop in the link text looks weird, but so does a naked full stop immediately after an underlined and colour-highlighted link
So what’s the right way to solve this? At the moment, my site contains a very inconsistent mixture of different styles - and I want to sort them out, but I need to choose the right solution first
Ultimately the only thing that matters is consistency.
I’ve written style manuals for several different companies, each of which made different choices in exactly this situation. The choices are completely arbitrary, and come under the heading of “style,” not “grammar.” As such, it’s your decision. But what makes it an actual “style” is consistency.
Choose a style, write and disseminate a memo codifying that style, and stick to it. When exceptions crop up, make a choice and add them to your memo. Thus are style manuals born.
We can’t tell you what’s right or wrong, but we can give suggestions. What kind of site? What type of tone are you trying to convey?
My advice:
Look at other sites like yours and see what they do. And in all the situations you mention, few are going to say putting in the period is wrong. Except including the period in the link: I’ve never seen that done.
Agreed. But occasionally you get a bulleted item that is two sentences. It’s annoying but it happens. In that case, you’d have a period on the first sentence, and then what? What about the second sentence?
The firm I worked for in Chicago decided that ALL bulleted items would be without a period. Period. So, first sentence gets period, second sentence is trumped by the bullet style and remains period free.
Again, somewhat awkward, but either option is awkward. So you make a decision and stick to it.
Did you omit all those full stops in the OP to see if we’d notice?
If so, the answer’s yes
It looks ok to me to have a single non-full-stopped sentence by itself, but wierd to have a stop at the end of one sentence and then none at the end of the para.
My totally individual YMMV preference would be to put all the full stops on multi-sentence paras, outside weblinks. Though of course there is another way of ending a sentence that doesn’t involve a full stop - but it might not suit your style
Always include the period, except when ending a sentence with a link. Adding a period to the link creates a risk of ambiguity or error. Good practice would be to avoid ending a sentence with a link, but this will not be practical in many if not most cases.
Generally, I’d suggest that the link should be either enclosed in parentheses or on a separate line by itself, indented.
