Re: typestyle of punctuation

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

One reason, I would assume, is the difficulty of determining whether or
not the punctuation was in fact part of the original. Authors--even, or
maybe especially, scholarly ones--are incredibly sloppy (you would not
believe the nuber of misattributions and misquotations I've caught in
scholarly MSS), so to save the editors, typesetters, and proofreaders
hours of research and literal and figurative headaches, we just make a
flat rule. But it should be noted that when the actual punctuarion might
be relevant--say, in textual criticism--authors are expected to follow
the text exactly, and editors to "follow copy out the window."
	The thing that I find troublesome is the modern American horror of
double punctuation. If I have a nondefining relative clause, a
nonrestricive appositive, or an item in a series, and any of them end
with a question mark or an exclamation point (whether part of a title or
a quotation or not), I want to be able to use the required comma, but US
publishing practice won't let me, even though clarity often suffers from
its omission.
Patricia