things kevin hates

Here’s another one for you punctuation maniacs out there. When you get to a closing quotation mark, a number of different rules govern whether certain punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points) go inside or outside of that closing quote. In proper American usage, there are three different categories:

1) Question marks and exclamation points. These go either inside or outside the closing quotation mark depending on whether they are part of the quoted material or merely part of the sentence as a whole. (If they belong to both the quote and the sentence as a whole, they go inside.)

2) Colons and semicolons. These always go outside the closing quote, since you’re not likely end a piece of quoted matter with one of these.

3) Commas and periods. In American usage, these always go inside the closing quote. Let me make that clear: commas and periods ALWAYS go inside closing quotes.* This may seem somewhat illogical. I’ll even admit that it is somewhat illogical to put something that isn’t part of the quoted material inside the quotes. But it’s ugly. If you put the closing quote and then the period or comma, you get an ugly mass of white surrounding that period or comma. It floats there so lonely and adrift in a sea of white, with the quotation mark loitering loftily in the distance to its upper left. The aesthetic disgust and horror far outweighs any “logic” involved. I refuse to deface this blog with any examples, but try it for yourself somewhere. Putting that comma or period outside is simply grotesque.

Now, can I respect the alternate view? Yes (or at least much more so than I can respect those who don’t use the serial comma. I’ve had this argument with intelligent people who supported the British usage. The origin of the American usage seems to come from old printing presses, where the small comma and periods could easily be broken if they were off somewhere by themselves. (I really have no idea how this happened.) And yes, one can certainly argue that it’s silly to base modern usage on a custom whose purpose has long since been supplanted. But it’s just ugly to do otherwise. The subject recently came up at The Volokh Conspiracy, with the author there calling the American usage “more aesthetically pleasing,” while also noting that it is, quite simply, “correct in American usage, because it is usage and not logic that defines linguistic correctness.” Now, I suppose we could get into all sorts of prescriptivist vs. descriptivist debates, and if you want to, go right ahead. But if you’re American, you should be putting your commas and periods inside your quotation marks. And if you want to launch a massive campaign to change this rule, you should consider the damage it would do upon people’s eyeballs.

And for those who would put logic above beauty, don’t expect me to be swayed by such an argument. I’m a heterosexual male, so I clearly prefer the beautiful to the logical.

* British usage is different. But considering I’m American, and roughly 99% of my audience is American, I’ll stick with the American usage. And besides, the Brits are wrong, though I suppose, if you happened to be in Britain, I could see the point for following their rule. When in Rome do as the Romans do and all that.