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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | kcronin <fiatluxury@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: What a Concept (grammar tangent: no musical content) |
| Date | Wed, 26 Nov 2003 09:02:02 -0800 (PST) |
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Stewart say:
> No, Josh is right. Unless there's an exception in
> one of the style guides
> that I'm not familiar with (I was strictly MLA and
> Chicago in school
> myself), all punctuation except for commas and
> periods falls outside the
> quotation marks.
Well, she ain't MLA, but I favor the GrammarLady
(www.grammarlady.com) for being practical and also
more current than MLA/Chicago book o style. She
agrees with Stewart also, to wit:
"Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation
Quotation marks. For punctuation with quoted words,
follow the conventions of American printers:
place the period and the comma always within the
quotation marks.
place the colon and semicolon always outside the
quotation marks.
place the dash, question mark, and exclamation mark
within the quotation marks when they apply only to the
quoted matter; place them outside when they apply to
the whole sentence.
And recently we added a fourth rule :
if the construction of your sentence is such that the
same punctuation would appear inside and outside the
quotation marks (e.g.,…?''? or …!''!) use only the
first. ...then even more recently, someone asked about
xxx...?,"...xx. GL's reply was to leave out the comma
since there was already a natural pause with the "?"
(and besides, it looked weird)."
By these reckonings, then, Josh's setting the phrases
apart w/quotation marks (which I take to be an
indication of irony, given Josh's general level of
writerliness witnessed on audities, though I don't
think rock opera needs em either) sets the idea apart
from the rest of the sentence, but the sentence itself
is a question warranting its own, so to speak,
punctuation.
Ahhh. So much better now.
--kelly
=====
arma non servant modum
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