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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (2376)	4/28/1999 7:07:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4711

My rule of thumb, and I don't vouch for its correctness - merely its intuitive value, is that a sentence or a quote incorporating a punctuation mark gets to keep it inside the quotes. For a phrase or fragment I close quotes and finish the sentence in the normal way.

To: E who wrote (2376)	4/28/1999 7:25:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 4711

E, you opened a real can of worms with that question about when & whether to put a punctuation mark AFTER the final quotation mark or BEFORE it. I should say that the style books of most (or perhaps all) media organizations call for putting the punctuation mark BEFORE the second quotation mark, no matter what. (Unless it is a colon, that is.) When not on the job, I personally defy that ruling, which strikes me as totally counter-intuitive and illogical. The period, in my view, should come at the end of the sentence, not at the end of the quotation, which is only a fragment of the whole sentence. There are grammarians (including Fowler, as I recall) who can be invoked in support of this practice (which Lather also follows). Anyway, we had quite a discussion of this point some ages ago on this thread. I keep on thinking I ought to go back and put together some little Grammar Lab "anthologies" of the discussions on particular subjects that come up over and over again...But of course, I have been too lazy/busy to do so... Joan

To: E who wrote (2376)	4/30/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

LAB ANTHOLOGY: SPLITTING INFINITIVES In my original response to your question about punctuation, E, I noted that the same questions (including yours) seem to come up over and over again. So I said I would try to put together some "anthologies" of posts on particular issues. If a question came up, we could refer the questioner to the relevant anthology. Then, if he/she did not find the answers satisfactory, we could then take the discussion to a higher level. That way, we would not have to start the discussion all the way over from scratch again. Well, this whole business has proved to be more time-consuming than I thought it would be, even though I read through only those discussions I remembered, in which I had participated myself. But I was absent from the thread for some fairly long stretches. If anyone remembers -- and can locate -- some particularly good discussions on a particular point, please zap the URLs to me, and I will put them into the hopper. Here is the first Anthology. And maybe it will provoke some more argument -- I hope so! techstocks.com techstocks.com techstocks.com techstocks.com techstocks.com jbe