jutfrank
VIP Member
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2014
- Member Type
- English Teacher
- Native Language
- English
- Home Country
- England
- Current Location
- England
With the simple aim of hearing members' thoughts and practices on the issue, I'd like to discuss punctuating quoted language—an issue which crops up quite regularly on the forum, and on which members seem to have quite firm and occasionally conflicting positions.
Here's a post by Piscean today:
Somebody looking for patterns/rules of usage might wonder why the quoted question Should I go? includes sentence-ending punctuation as part of the quote (quite rightly) while the quoted statement (I should go.) does not.
For the sake of both consistency and clarity, shouldn't we write:
He wrote "I should go.".
Is there any reason (other than convention) why not to include the quotation-ending punctuation? (We assume of course that the period is in fact quotation-ending.)
What do you all think?
Here's a post by Piscean today:
There are no universally accepted rules on punctuation for quotation. What follows is how I punctuate.
Only sentence-ending punctuation:
He wrote "I should go".
Did he write "I should go"?
Sentence-ending and quotation-ending punctuation:
He wrote "Should I go?".
Did he write "Should I go?"?
Somebody looking for patterns/rules of usage might wonder why the quoted question Should I go? includes sentence-ending punctuation as part of the quote (quite rightly) while the quoted statement (I should go.) does not.
For the sake of both consistency and clarity, shouldn't we write:
He wrote "I should go.".
Is there any reason (other than convention) why not to include the quotation-ending punctuation? (We assume of course that the period is in fact quotation-ending.)
What do you all think?