I tend to agree with the author. While it's logically consistent, it's typographically redundant. There's no need to end a sentence with a full stop, a quotation mark, another full stop, and then a space, before beginning the next sentence with a capital letter.
But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.
* Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and style guide used.
* Repetitions: unless used as a stylistic device (in poetry, advertising, etc.), your editors will try to modify repeated words, trying to find synonyms. In technical writing, it is an abomination, and competent editors know very well they must not touch any specific terms, no matter how often repeated, as they have very precise meaning.
But in general, the rules present in style guides are meant to ensure consistency and uniform reading experience, so that the reader is not distracted by form and can concentrate on the meaning, so they are a good thing as long as people are aware these are just arbitrary rules separate from spelling and grammar.
But, as you say, in technical writing, it's enormously irritating. I do a fair bit of freelance writing, and it pisses me off no end when editors and clients change a technical term for an apparent near synonym because they don't understand the nuance. It makes the sentence nonsensical and makes me look as though I don't know what I'm talking about.
Any level of nested parenthesis is fine (is what I think at least (as someone who's written a bit of Lisp of Lisp (or Racket and Clojure specifically) (because you get kinda used to it (when in a way they just become invisible (or unnoticeable))))). But nested quotations is also an issue with backtick (`) when doing command substitution in the shell, and we have to resort to $() to fix it. There's not really a $()-like syntax for written English though.
There sort of is, if you use "smart" quotes. “Hard to find on a phone keyboard though, and not that distinct.”
Parentheticals in English sit in this sort of midpoint between a modifying clause for necessary elaboration and a footnote/end-note for optional detail, and lots of people including me use parentheses where "inlining" the parentheses or moving them to a footnote would be more appropriate. That's in addition to conventional uses of parentheses, like to expand abbreviations.
As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
Every effort to make a logically consistent "engineered" language has so far failed by any reasonable measure, notably, Esperanto. Others have tried and had even less success than Esperanto. For things to even change in language usage there really has to be a pain point or some kind of trauma or isolation. Mere aspiration for aesthetics or logical consistency isn't enough. How did the American English come to be anyway? A bunch of people got on boats and went to a remote wild continent and stayed there. Forever.
My newspaper will shorten "United States" to "U.S.", and not add an extra period at the end of a sentence. (Not sure if the spaces are different widths.) When the next word would naturally start with a capital letter it can be difficult to tell whether the sentence ends after the abbreviation, sometimes making for garden-path sentences.
>> There have been some rumblings inside the U.S. Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer said in an interview...
Though I am a programmer, so maybe it is just us...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...
simple-statement =
empty-statement
| assignment-statement
| procedure-statement
| goto-statement .
empty-statement = .
In practice the separator-vs-terminator distinction mostly shows up in if-statements:
if foo then
bar
else
baz;
Still I actually struggled each time this given not exactly sure I am in English or American camp.
To that end, I am struggling to think of a time where the punctuation at the end of a quote really mattered. Even exclamations are less necessary, with the support of the surrounding sentance. Consider; they screamed "stop" to get the attention of everyone. And, "stop!" they screamed. In both, the change of voice to the quoted word is about the same.
The outside sentence can continue after the quote; the terminating period outside of the quote is necessary if the sentence is ending there.
We know that the quote has ended with the closing quote, and so we can agree on the convention that there is an implied period there, if the quoted material is a complete clause with subject and verb. If it needs some other punctuation like a question mark, then that is explicit.
> He asked me "what time is it?".
The ? ends the question, the . ends the sentence that contains the embedded question.
The enclosing sentence can continue:
> He asked me "what time is it?" but hurriedly walked away as I glanced at my watch.
Now you positively, definitely cannot remove the period after "watch". Why would you remove it if the words "but ... watch" are deleted?
This stuff is simply too important to leave in the hands of people who have never written a compiler.
I meant my point mostly tongue in cheek. Redundancy is not necessarily bad.
I do have trouble reading your sentence, though. The change of voice in a declarative sentence to interrogative without a stop, is kind of jarring. In that one, I'd leave off the quote and question mark, I think.
That all said, I think I mainly agree that it is all guidelines and mostly driven by reasons we no longer remember or care about. The rule I remember hearing was that the smaller character of the period was preferred inside the larger character, as the period was prone to break if done in the other way.
> He asked me what time it is, and ....
Now we have an embedded wh-clause, not an embedded quote. Embedded wh-clauses are not questions.
(One piece of evidence: subject and auxiliary are not inverted, appearing as it is rather than is it.)
It’s not futile to reconsider conventions, no matter that demands may go ignored.
Also, your preceding paragraph highlights another issue: what if the sentence being quoted has different punctuation than the sentence it's placed in? You wrote a sentence that should end in a question mark, but the quote should end with a period.
> Blah blah "Quoted sentence in entirety."
versus
> Blah blah "Quoted sentence fragment".
and he said: "Mary, let's go
--- page ---
fishing".
"...and also look ugly.",
In that case, the convention of placing just a comma inside the quotation marks if the quoted sentence were complete but the quoting sentence were not seems much cleaner.
He said "I came in with the tide.", but she wasn't listening.
He said "I came in with the tide.," but she wasn't listening.
However, I do personally think the full stop inside the quotes is redundant and would remove it, unless it made a real difference to the sentence meaning.
Can you construct a pair of sentences where the potential ambiguity would be meaningful and not trivially resolved with context?
Yes, but what I'm talking about is the reverse situation. How would you know whether or not the quoting (outer) sentence is complete? You cannot logically infer that from the quoted (inner) sentence, which is why I'm saying that the second period is not redudant.
That is true for the inner sentence, but again, I'm talking about the outer sentence. It needs its own terminator to make it unambiguously clear that it is complete.
"You are going" has a very different meaning from "You are going.", because the first implies there is something `you` are going to do. Whilst the second implies you are being ordered to leave.
I agree that maintaining punctuation of the quote is important for context. But outside of the quote, it practically never matters if there is a period or not after the quote. The reader may choose.
> He looks up, "This is it." Bob says, gazing at the sky.
I'm just saying that the outer/quoting sentence needs its own punctuation regardless of what's going on in between those quotation marks.
E.g.: '«Are you joking?!», he said. The other replied, «I'm not joking at all». They went on'.
, ; : .
If you're at a full stop, the second . feels superfluous.
See the problem there? The quoted sentence is not a question, but the outer sentence is; why, then, is the question mark inside the quotation marks? Double punctuation would solve that ambiguity, and would not be redundant.
Alternatively, and I'm not sure which is correct, if the question mark is outside the quotation marks, was the quote a complete sentence?
Did you ask, "Is this your dog?"?
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, “I refute it thus.”, as his foot rebounded.
Is the period redundant? Or the comma after it? None of them? This looks almost as ugly as two periods.
The structure of the whole looks incomplete and unbalanced without the second full-stop, which I find ugly. I guess that I care more about logical structure (or my idea of logical structure), than typographical utility.
How are you today?.
This is important!.
I want to call to your attention this very important!! point: always checks the return value of your system calls.
Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
> Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
Or would they have commas as is used when the : is degrades into the less definitive ;?
Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me. I would suggest one of the following:
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.
You've chosen not to quote the full stop. There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right?
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.”
This also works if the quoted sentence ends with a question or exclamation mark.
It's a shame that punctuation of human languages can't be logical, but it seems that we're stuck with inconsistent requirements and messy compromises. Cases like the following really confuse and annoy me:
“On the other hand[,]”[,] she said, “we could wait till dark[.]”[.]
(Should that depend on whether the original spoken sentence would, if written, contain a comma after "hand"?)
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus?”!
AFAICS, the only way to render this faithfully is the way I just did. In other words, you really do need the punctuation both of the outer sentence and the inner sentence. By extension, the only logical approach for the original sentence would be:
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.”.
On a different note, might I use this moment to complain about American books not closing quotations, if they continue on onto a new paragraph, and then opening them again? I.e.:
John said: "I have two things to say.
"One of these things is this.
"The other thing is this."
John spoke to Paul. John said: "I have two things to say.
"One of the things is this."
"What's the other?"
"The other thing is this."
Even in the purest programming languages, we're happy to design special-case idioms that sacrifice perfect orthogonality for better human factors, provided there's an unambiguous parse. Scheme provides (define <identifier> <expression>) - utterly elementary. Yet defining functions by binding identifiers to anonymous lambdas is so annoying that an unneccesary and inconsistent second syntax is provided, (define (<identifier <args...>) <expression>).
Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"
John said: "I have two things to say."
"What are they?"
"One of these things is this.
"The other thing is this."
– how would you punctuate that? If you close each paragraph with a quote, then there's no way to tell who's speaking except to label each paragraph:
Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"
John said: "I have two things to say."
Bob asked: "What are they?"
John answered: "One of these things is this."
John continued: "The other thing is this."
And if you don't open each quoted paragraph with a quote, it's very hard to tell which paragraphs are quoted:
John said: "I have two things to say.
One of these things is this.
The other thing is this."
The third thing, he kept to himself.
Oh, if only languages worked so consistently.
DESCRIPTION_OF_WHAT_WAS_SAID: "$(DIRECT_QUOTE.)".
Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure.
Reality seemed to involve eldritch abominations like one system I encountered that had entire Base64 encoded XML documents embedded as attribute values in a higher level document and then this approach applied recursively....
Edit: Of course, this wasn't XMLs fault - but for some reason a lot of XML used in the "enterprise" world seemed to be primarily designed to eat the soul of whoever gazed upon it.
JSON?
Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...
The second, appears to be a tool for parsing a json blob which has been escaped and encoded as a simple string inside another json blob. That's certainly an interesting problem, and one that is likely to come up in a sufficiently complicated world - however it's not an issue with parsing JSON. It's an issue with parsing /any/ data structure or language that may contain strings and as such seems unavoidable.
Except for a data format which would allow embedding data in a nested fashion without altering it in any way. For example:
some_object_field: "some value"
some_other_field:
with_sub_objects:
and_sub_fields: "with values"
and_also_fields:
"""
which_allow_objects:
embedded_as_strings: "without transforming the structure"
which_both: "JSON and XML"
have_somewhat: "failed to do"
#""" control sequences should also be valid in the body, as long as there is proper indentation, a la Python
# which could then be simply stripped for display, for example, based on the first """ having N indentation
# then it would follow that the rest of the data entries have N+TAB_WIDTH, which could be simply stripped
# also, processing the beginning of every line would be less expensive than iterating through the entire line in search of escaped \n or anything of the sort
"""
As a consequence, the amount of parsing and processing that you need to do is really bad for performance. Of course, there are formats like YAML and TOML that go in the opposite direction - they try to cover all use cases and end up being overcomplicated.
There are occasionally other attempts like JSON5 to improve things: https://json5.org/
However those also oftentimes are not very popular, because there is just too much ecosystem that has been built around the older formats, like XML, JSON and even YAML.
"On the other hand", she said, "we could wait 'til dark".
Well, I don't really like that; it just doesn't look nice to me.
s/the punctuation of //While we're on the topic, all the journals I'm familiar with require punctuation like full stops (aka periods) to be included in displaystyle maths expressions. There is a some logical justification for this, but it looks awful, and can be downright confusing depending on the sort of notation employed. It particularly irks me to see a spare comma tagged on to the end of a tensor calculus expression, that's supposed to be understood in the context of the surrounding prose, rather than the adjecant mathematical expression.
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus. I refute it thus”.
This looks "unbalanced" to me.
If it's important to the writer that what is quoted be identified as a sentence then I agree with you, and I'm going to start using that construction in my writing.
But when it comes to quoting words people say, is often good enough to just quote the words.
When you store a command in a string, to you include the trailing newline? I usually don't, but it'll always depend on the use case.
Of course you can shorten your quote by one character and leave out the inner stop, and I'd say that was equally valid. I would tend to do that unless I want to make it absolutely clear that what I was quoting wasn't a run-on sentence that continued after that point.
> More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly.
I agree with you in principle, but aesthetics matter!
/\."\./, /\."/ /\.([^\w])\./, /\.$1/It's always possible to make a full sentence quotation after a colon, possibly using indentation:
With just enough of learning to misquote.
— Lord Byron
“One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote.”
— Alexander Pope
“Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent and power.”
— AnonymousIt doesn't. The end quote with a period inside it ends the sentence.
> I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences
There aren't. English doesn't nest or overlap sentences. Ever. Therr are plenty of ways in which English combines multiple units which each could otherwise be their own sentences into more complex sentences, but none of them involve having something which remains a sentence inside a longer sentence.
I won't say it isn't so (that would be redundant), but this example makes my point again.
What a weird interpretation. Two characters shouldn't be needed to end a sentence, only a period can end a sentence. It'd be a lot easier to postulate the period inside ends the sentence and the quotation mark ends the quote that just ran outside the end of the sentence by one character.
.”. Feels like a visual stutter.
Either .” or “. are more final and visually stable.
I’d argue depending on whether the pause affected by the period is important to the quote itself, put it in the quote. Then again, a block-quotation is probably more suitable for that scenario. Personally, for basic quotes in prose I’d put the period on the outside of quote because that directs readers to pause after the quote ends, not before.
But .” is always syntactically wrong when then quoted text didn't have a full stop in it, and ”. is ambiguous about whether it's a complete sentence or not.
If I’m reading a book or essay and I come across this type of punctuation, it actually actively removes me from my flow of reading and causes me to stop for a moment and lose immersion - same with obvious spelling and grammatical errors.
It’s amazing how dependent our reading immersion is on proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.
I prefer to think it is what you are accustomed to, or habituated to.
From these comments a number of people including me, prefer to use the .”. form because we find that more aesthetically pleasing. I had discovered the .”. form myself because I play with my punctuation (and words and grammar), and until this discussion I hadn’t noticed others use .”.*.
I presume other other programmers play with syntax and punctuation too.
* Note I have italicised .”. and if you zoom on an iPad the full stops [US periods] change from squares to rhombusы.
Having to make the extra decision on whether the punctuation should be in, or outside the quote is too much to think about.
Is "go there" a valid quotation of "never go there"?
But come on – should a punctuation style guide prevent misleading quotations? Can a punctuation style guide even do so?
This looks completely bizarre to me. I hope this never becomes a standard.
I don't care what other people think, this is the only thing that makes sense if you ask me.
I would argue clarity and elegance don't oppose one another; elegance means being as clear as possible without being clumsy or heavy handed, and without insulting your reader's intelligence. Said reader is not a machine, they're supposed to be fluent in the language.
We should reduce ambiguity as much as possible, but no more than that. Adding signs where no ambiguity remains only worsens the signal to noise ratio.
The single period favours both elegance and clarity over slavish and unimaginative punctiliousness.
I used to love to write. That all ended in college, with English Instructors. I wasen't the only student either.
There was so much emphasis on grammar, interesting writers just seemed to sound all alike. I enjoyed some of the papers that were read aloud the first few weeks. By the end of the courses, the papers were technically correct, but boring, and lacked imagination. I could see the enthusiasm drain from the students faces with every paper covered in red Sharpie corrections.
I had one teacher that used to down grade me for not writing out numbers 1-10, and only using numbers for 11 on. I still don't know what's right, or care anymore.
(I believe S & W recommends writing out 1-10.)
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”.
as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote.
I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.