« The Twilight of American Culture | Main | UCLA Law Review »
23 April 2003
Punctuation? WWSD?
On this anniversay of Shakespeare's birth (and death), I find myself at odds with conventional wisdom regarding the use of punctuation inside quotation marks. This concern arises as I review the instructions file for an updated, very spiffy Watson tool to be released in a few short days. (More on that when it becomes available.)
The question I put to you is:* "When quotation marks are used to delineate a 'concept', rather than a quotation from 'another source,' should punctuation, used merely to break up or stop a sentence, i.e., not originating from the concept itself, be retained, as is traditional, within the quotation marks; or, should the marks be moved outside of the quotes, so as to better delineate the concept?"
Bartleby's, in my opinion, is actually of little help. While they do acknowledge that quotation marks are used to enclose "peculiar" words and then go on to say that periods and commas should go inside the quotation marks, while colons and semi-colons should not, the examples they give really only relate to using quotation marks to import text from other sources. I argue that in our post-modern age, quotation marks are being used more and more to talk about "concepts" rather than "sources". In that case, one should be careful to accurately present the concept and note that the words are being used in a special sense. Why clutter that up with extraneous punctuation that can live just as happily on the other side of the mark? I'm convinced I'll ultimately be proven right. What do you think?
*with apologies to my 7th-grade teacher who didn't like my run-on sentences.