Slowhand wrote:Dude at work always uses the word "insure" when he means "ensure".

Bucky wrote:especially when he's at the grocery store

phatj wrote:Did we ever talk about the American convention to put commas and other punctuation inside quotes even if they're not part of the sentence or phrase being quoted? Ugh.

phatj wrote:Did we ever talk about the American convention to put commas and other punctuation inside quotes even if they're not part of the sentence or phrase being quoted

phatj wrote:Ugh

Phan In Phlorida wrote:Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful"?
vs.
Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful?"

Big difference.

The Dude wrote:that's only if the question marks or ! are part of the quote though

Grotewold wrote:

Phan In Phlorida wrote:Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful"?
vs.
Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful?"

Big difference.

That's a strange sentence to put in print, though. I get what you guys are saying on a technical level, for some things, but it just looks so much cleaner within the quote.

phatj wrote:

Grotewold wrote:

Phan In Phlorida wrote:Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful"?
vs.
Have you ever gazed into a woman's eyes and said "You're beautiful?"

Big difference.

That's a strange sentence to put in print, though. I get what you guys are saying on a technical level, for some things, but it just looks so much cleaner within the quote.

It only looks cleaner because that's the convention, but regardless, adding ambiguity for aesthetic purposes strikes me as dumb.

The most common question people ask about quotation marks is whether periods and commas go inside or outside, and the answer depends on where your audience lives because in American English we always put periods and commas inside quotation marks, but in British English periods and commas can go inside or outside (kind of like the American rules for question marks and exclamation points). I use this memory trick: Inside the US, inside the quotation marks. Here are some examples:

“Don’t underestimate me,” she said with a disarmingly friendly smile.

I can never remember how to spell “bureaucracy.”

Don’t get confused when you see this handled differently in The Economist or on the BBC website; just remember that it’s different in those publications because the British do it differently.

Compositors―people who layout printed material with type―made the original rule that placed periods and commas inside quotation marks to protect the small metal pieces of type from breaking off the end of the sentence. The quotation marks protected the commas and periods. In the early 1900s, it appears that the Fowler brothers (who wrote a famous British style guide called The King’s English) began lobbying to make the rules more about logic and less about the mechanics of typesetting. They won the British battle, but Americans didn’t adopt the change. That’s why we have different styles.

Stepping up the ladder of quotation-mark complexity we find question marks and exclamation points: where they go depends on your sentence. If the question mark or exclamation point is part of your quotation, it stays inside; but if the question mark or exclamation point are not part of the quotation, they go outside the closing quotation mark.

In the next examples, the terminal punctuation is part of the quotation, so it stays inside the final quotation mark:

Reynold asked, “Can we have ice cream for dinner?”

Mom snapped and shouted, “No, we cannot have ice cream for dinner!”

On the other hand, in these examples, the terminal punctuation is not part of the quotation―it applies to the whole sentence―so it goes outside the final quotation mark:

Do you actually like “Gangnam Style”?

I can’t believe you lied to me about the ending of “The Sixth Sense”!