“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

A Note on Punctuation

Tue, Nov 24, 2009

For something like three centuries, the custom in English has been that the punctuation of a surrounding clause can be incorporated in quoted text. Thus we get things like this:

“Put your gun down,” said the sheriff.

In this example, if the sheriff’s speech were simply reported with no surrounding context, it probably would read like this:

“Put your gun down!”

Or maybe

“Put your gun down.”

Since I worked in the computing world for several decades, I became conscious that this old habit of English punctuation (and its equivalents, shared with many other languages) is not accurate. The purpose of quotation marks should be to reproduce inside them whatever speech is being reported. As a result, we now see punctuation like this:

“Put your gun down!”, said the sheriff.

Often the comma will be left out. I remember worrying about this tiny problem when I was in high school. One of my classmates said that what I wanted to do was silly because it led to a succession of punctuation marks.

Nowadays we worry about getting the quotation exactly right, because in computing it often matters. So I now follow a modern rule, according to which whatever is in side quotation marks should be exactly as if there were no quotation marks at all, and the speech is the only thing being reported. I see nothing wrong with three or four successive punctuation marks. Punctuation is cheap. Use lots of it.

My rule leads to an interesting problem, however. To me, it’s not much of a problem, but for some people it will be bothersome. Here’s the example in old-style punctuation:

She fell into his arms and said, “Oh! I’m so glad you’re back. But your mother said, ‘He’s gone. He left on the train on Tuesday.’”

Here the internal quotation is marked by “single quotes”. This is the usual practice in English today. I would have written this as

She fell into his arms and said “Oh! I’m so glad you’re back. But your mother said “He’s gone. He left on the train on Tuesday.””.

Here speech in double quotes is inside more speech that’s also in double quotes. The apostrophe (usually used for a right-hand single quotation mark in English) is restricted to use for contractions. Note also the punctuation at the very end, where we see a period (ending the second-level quotation), then two successive right double quotation marks, and finally another period (ending the whole sentence in which speech is embedded).

If you don’t like this, don’t do it. But at least my practice is entirely consistent and permits at all times complete retrieval of quoted speech with no further processing.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me