Re: typestyle of punctuation

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

 -0500, you wrote:
> ** Reply to message from Robert Holmgren At 4/4/2002 12:19 PM
>
> I've never understood the rationale for this. For example, if I quote you on
> the matter of "periods and commas inside", it absolutely defies logic and
> violates accuracy that the last-previous comma in the present sentence
> should go
> before the terminal quotation mark (unless of course the comma were actually
> part of the quotation, which it isn't). What's the reasoning?
The rationale is really to achieve consistency. Copperud (American Usage
and Style), Bernstein (The Careful Writer) Follett (Modern American Usage)
and others either say or suggest that American *printers* do it one way,
Brits the other, habit or original practice, nothing more. [From printers
we can infer publishers.] Still the question is a good one, for it reminds
writers to look for logic when we set out the bricks of a sentence. I've
not seen anywhere, Fowler on down or up, a disquisition on this, save the
injunction always to attempt a certain standardization. Maybe the
difference is cultural. I work in a shop where everything is given a
cultural spin, a Derrida twist, if you will, for example, "the culture of
objectivity," to describe the feelings one member of our group has for the
practice and ethos of newspaper writers. Perhaps there's a "culture of
punctuation." I hope not.

Michael Norman