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

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2377)	4/28/1999 7:16:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

I think that's what the Brits do. It's what I do-- what seems logical. But there are fancier rules. I'll be jbe knows them. We had a dedicated thread master some time back, but he disappeared. Now that I think if it, maybe it was 'she' who disappeared. I can't remember his or her handle, which is shameful, he or she was so helpful. Strict, but helpful. I just got to my computer today, and see I am hundreds of posts behind even if I only skim the 407 posts I'm behind on Rambi's thread. Oh, the burden of it! My first stop... Beltane. I must take me to the Festival grounds to see what those rapscallions are up to.

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2377)	4/28/1999 7:49:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

May be intuitive, but is not standard. Standard is that a period or comma falls within the quotation marks whether or not it is part of the quotation. Some grammarians (punctuationists?) argue that semi-colons and colons are treated the same, but others allow them outside the quotation marks if they are not part of the quotation. I had a very competent grammar teacher in 7th grade and I argued this one quite strenuously (that you shouldn't put the comma inside the quotation marks if it wasn't in the quotation originally) and I lost. He proved it to me and made me accept defeat, which was as difficult a feat then as it is now. <g> (However, I got the same teacher on a math issue, made him admit he was wrong, so in my mind we were equals.) BTW: am very impressed with the SI spell checker; didn't blink on punctuationists. Edit after first posting: looked it up in Random House College Dictionary, which I use at work (all my good reference books are at home) and it says quite clearly "Final quotation marks follow other punctuation marks, except for semicolons and colons." Their example: Ed began reading Williams's "The Glass Menagerie"; then he turned to "A Streetcar Named Desire."