Re: "xxx." or "xxx".

["Ridder, Fred" <F -dot- Ridder -at- DIALOGIC -dot- COM>]

Ah, another one of my favorite recurring subjects.  I just love it when
the
list archive isn't working (or when people forget to consult it first).

This issue of where punctuation should fall relative to quote marks is
another one of those differences between American English and what
I guess has to be called British English (kind of a misnomer since
many of the countries that use this flavor of the language are no longer
part of the British Empire).  Notice that Terence Kieren, whose reply
voted for the "b" forms, is from Australia. Kris Olberg's response to
your question suggested that you challenge your associates to show
you documentation to support their usage, and I'm certain that they
could do this; the only problem is their textbooks or style guides
would most likely be from England or Canada or Australia rather
than from Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Personally, I've always found the American rule to be non-intuitive in
relation to fragmentary quotes or when using quotes to indicate a
reference to a literal word (e.g. using "slave" out of context...) or a
special term. My personal preference leads me to choose 1a but 2b
as the best usage, but this is MOO.

Fred Ridder  (mailto:f -dot- ridder -at- dialogic -dot- com)
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic Corporation, Parsippany, NJ

And to keep our marketing people happy:
Get the Dialogic Edge at:  http://www.dialogic.com


>-----Original Message-----
>From:  DIGEST Barbara Diorio [SMTP:BarbD33 -at- AOL -dot- COM]
>Sent:  Thursday, September 18, 1997 11:27 PM
>Subject:       "xxx." or "xxx".
>
>Five technical writers, one office, two opinions.   When a sentence ends with
>a word in quotation marks, do you put the punctuation (period or comma - we
>agree on the other punctuation marks) inside the quotation marks or outside
>the quotation marks?  The various guides that we checked all indicated that
>1a and 2a (below) are correct, but some of the writers swear that they were
>taught to follow 1b and 2b.   What do you think?
>
>1a.   "Tell me what you think," said Barb.
>1b.   "Tell me what you think", said Barb.
>
>2a.    Each fix is moved to the restricted area by a "gatekeeper."
>2b.    Each fix is moved to the restricted area by a "gatekeeper".
>

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