Punctuation within quotes

[Bradk3]

And THAT reminds me about the old joke about the panda:

A panda walks into a restaurant and orders a nice meal. After finishing, he pulls out a revolver, fires a shot into the air and walks out of the restaurant. The startled restaurant owner rushes out after him, demanding to know what he thought he was doing. With a sigh, the panda pulls out a page from an article on wildlife diets.

"It's right there, buddy," the panda says, pointing to the following description:

Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves.

Motto: Commas are important...

 

[Rat]

...is a charming little prayer for children:

"God bless my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope."

Often seen as the apocryphal book dedication: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God". But this is perhaps not the time to start an argument on the Oxford comma.

See the Jargon File for discussion on how punctuation style affects technical writing style.

Cheers,
Rat.

 

[Cynric]

When dealing with technical issues, where an exact bit of text must be denoted, I place quotation marks around the text itself without regard for conventional rules of English. When typing normal prose I place ending punctuation within the quotation marks, which is the correct form in written American English. IIRC, British English places the punctuation outside the close quote mark but you'll want to hear from an actual Brit to see if that's the current practice.

I'm pretty sure that the convention is the same in real () English (i.e. punctation within inverted commas). I was taught that. In England. Circa 1980ish.

 

[Cynric]

Personally I cant abide punctuation it should all be collected together and left at the end of a sentence,':.

I think youre onto something there'. It would be like the German convention of always saving the verb until the end of the sentence or is it clause meaning you have to be patient to find out the meaning of the sentence (?),.

 

[SusanB-M1]

Re: 'Eats, Shoots and leaves', the book by Lynne Truss is not only an excellent guide to punctuation, but is also very funny; the second half of the book more so than the first I thought.

I used to be completely confident about punctuation, but the computer age has changed things somewhat. The Queen's English Society would always answer any query, but on British conventions, not American.

 

[Cuddles]

Re: 'Eats, Shoots and leaves', the book by Lynne Truss is not only an excellent guide to punctuation, but is also very funny; the second half of the book more so than the first I thought.

Obviously I didn't get far enough to find the funny bits

I used to be completely confident about punctuation, but the computer age has changed things somewhat. The Queen's English Society would always answer any query, but on British conventions, not American.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn279.html
So much for the Queen's English.

 

[SusanB-M1]

Lol - thank you! However, I must point out that the QES is concerned with correct use of the language, not the accent in which it is spoken... within reason of course!