Commas and Quotations
A stylistic note…
Classic English style dictates that the relative placement of punctuation and quotation marks is to be determined logically. Thus, commas and periods typically come after quotation marks, as in the following example:
…a post titled “Don’t Linger in this CAFE”, showing once and for all…
In America, we use a different set of rules:
“Put commas and periods within closing quotation marks, except when a parenthetical reference follows the quotation… Put colons and semicolons outside closing quotation marks… Put a dash, question mark, or exclamation point within closing quotation marks when the punctuation applies to the quotation itself and outside when it applies to the whole sentence.”
Thus, in America, the example quote would read:
…a post titled “Don’t Linger in this CAFE,” showing once and for all…
This is a stupid way of doing things, as it undermines the logic of written language.
The comma, for example, is intended to separate elements in a sentence; everything before a comma belongs to one element, everything after it to another. Quotation marks perform a similar task– they contain an element (the quoted text). If we use these marks logically, they should never be in conflict. In the example given, the American style has us placing the comma inside the quotation marks. If we keep these rules in mind and look at the example logically, one of two things is the case: either the comma is part of the quotation and thus does not separate the two elements, or the comma takes precedence over the quotation marks– which makes no sense, as that would render us unable to quote any text containing commas without destroying our sentence structure. Thus, the American method requires an ugly logical exception that the English method does not.
As the English method is more logically sound, I choose to use it when I write on this weblog. I don’t do this when writing for work or school, but that’s because in real life we don’t get to have discussions about the logical structure of language whenever we feel like it.
Bonus:
Note that the final period is inside the quotation marks in the quote describing American usage rules, as the logical construct that is the final sentence of the quoted text is closed within the quoted text and no parenthetical remarks follow.