Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

Re:Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation ov... by Veen on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @09:42AM (#28538923)

They do, but there's a limit to how much recursive embedding the average reader can cope with, especially if the writer embeds a lot of modifying clauses in the middle of the main clause so the reader is left waiting for information they need to make sense of the sentence as a whole.

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Re:Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation ov... by munchbunny on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @11:51AM (#28540648)

Absolutely agree. It's probably the biggest disconnect I feel between how ideas are structured in my head and how to best communicate them in written format.

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.

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