Let me quote you on that
Image: Chiltepinster via Wikimedia Commons (cc)
Attention pedants! If you’re looking for a fight, there’s no better field of battle than punctuation. Obviously the apostrophe is the punctuation mark that gets people the most steamed up, but the quotation mark or ‘inverted comma’ runs a close second.
In line with the trend for minimal punctuation, quotation marks are now usually rendered singly: ‘thus’. The more traditional double quotation marks only get a look in when you have a quote within a quote and you need to distinguish the 2.
For example:
The court transcript read, ‘She accosted me with her umbrella and said, “Hand over the cash”’.
And this brings us to the pedantic nub of the issue – placement of punctuation. As usual, they do it slightly differently in the USA – a fair indication that we are in the realm of fine distinctions where you could make a case either way.
Here’s the logic behind the Australian convention.
If the quoted material is presented alone, the final mark of punctuation goes inside the quotation mark.
‘Hand over the cash.’
But if there is a ‘carrier expression’ involved, the final mark of punctuation goes after the quotation mark, as it is seen as completing that sentence.
She said, ‘Hand over the cash’.
Personally, I don’t see why the completion of one sentence should take precedence over another. In America, the full stop (or ‘period’) would come before the final quotation mark. Why? It’s just convention. They do it over there but we don’t do it here.
