Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: giggly
  • Music: The Zappas, 'Baby One More Time.'

Possibly the best thing ever said by an editor.

I have a nasty tendency to forget to put the end punctuation of a sentence inside the ' marks when I'm constructing a sentence. So rather than punctuating like this:

"It was very much 'screw you, I'm taking the dog.'"

I'll punctuate like this:

"So it was all 'hate you, hate Kansas'."

Now, this is Not Exactly Correct. And one of my fabulous proofreaders just pointed it out to me by saying:

"The punctuation is LONELY outside of its proper kennel, Seanan! Let it in! Let it snuggle down inside the quotation marks with the rest of the sentence!"

...I love my proofreaders. I love them like burning.
Tags: i love my editors, proofreading
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  • 17 comments

djonn

May 29 2008, 22:50:04 UTC 9 years ago

Chicago and Words Into Type agree with your proofreader, but I'm with kyrielle; I consider the '." version clearer (and more grammatically accurate).

I've been told that what this actually reflects is a case where the typesetters overruled the grammarians. The problem was that early hot-type printing presses were designed so that every letter and every punctuation mark had to be laid in separately -- and it was far too easy for a period to simply fall off or be left off of the row of typeset letters if it was placed outside the quotation marks.

seanan_mcguire

May 30 2008, 00:14:08 UTC 9 years ago

Interesting!