Punctuation & Quotation Conventions
I write with an unusual convention about how punctuation and quotation interact with each other. Doing some basic research for this essay, I discovered that my style resembles the British style. However, I wasn’t consciously influenced by an awareness that anyone else was doing this; rather, I had a personal preference and a sense that I could get away with it.
The British style is also sometimes called the logical style. Also, the British are increasingly adopting the American style. Using the terms “British style”/”American style” somewhat presumes the normativity depends on what landmass you’re on, which seems like an unfortunate implication; so, I’ll be using the terms “Logical style”/”Illogical style”—capitalized to indicate that this refers to a specific convention, not necessarily what I really think is logical/illogical.
What I was taught to do in (American) school:
She used the phrase “absolute magic.”
Note that the period is not part of the phrase being quoted. It is instead part of the sentence being quoted.
What I do instead:
She used the phrase “absolute magic”.
So far, so Logical.
The Illogical style also changes periods to commas when attribution comes after a quotation:
“It isn’t magic,” she said.
Logical style accepts this in fiction, but for nonfiction, prefers:
“It isn’t magic”, she said.
I personally prefer to go “further” than the Logical convention in cases like this:
“It isn’t magic.”, she said.
I realize this is pretty ugly, but it follows the logic. The same instinct tempts me to write:
She said “It isn’t magic.”.
Here, I like to use a period both inside and outside of the quotation: one of the periods ends the sentence which sits inside quotation marks, whereas the other period ends the sentence which contains the quotation. The Logical convention leaves out the second period in such cases (as would the Illogical convention).
I don’t think I’ve been consistent about this further convention, due to being a bit bashful about it. If my sentence structure leads to this conclusion, I’ll usually shift the sentence structure in order to avoid it.
The main reason I’m writing the current post is to ask for feedback from readers. The only time I’ve been called out is when LessWrong specifically hired an editor for the published LessWrong books. The editor “fixed” all my punctuation to the Illogical convention. (I switched it all back before publication, however.) Perhaps I’ll be a bit braver about my punctuation preferences if I know what readers think.
The reason I adopted this convention is to respect the sanctity of quotation. Quine, Gödel, etc teach us the importance of maintaining a firm use/mention distinction. The surrounding sentence should not be allowed to reach in and change or add punctuation! What is inside quotation marks should be the quote!
I find the Illogical style excusable when quoting speech, since the spoken words do not actually contain punctuation anyway. For simplicity, however, it makes sense to use the same conventions when quoting text or speech.
I won’t claim I perfectly respect the sanctity of the use/mention distinction all the time. I would like to do better, but in some cases it is simply easier to be loose about what quotation marks mean. For example, I intentionally left this abuse in earlier:
The editor “fixed” all my punctuation to the Illogical convention.
This isn’t a quote, but rather, a scare-quote. Grognor once suggested using triple quotes to distinguish such cases, IE:
The editor “”“fixed””” all my punctuation to the Illogical convention.
I think this is a good convention, and perhaps I’ll adopt it more in the future.
Another case where I might be tempted to stretch the sanctity of quotation marks involves emphasis when defining a term:
A “tomato” is a red, savory fruit.
I think bolding or italics is a better convention for such cases.
So, any thoughts?
I particularly find definitions confusing. Which one is logically correct?
“Oculist” means “eye doctor”.
“Oculist” means eye doctor.
Oculist means “eye doctor”.
Oculist means eye doctor.
I would say 1 is the least incorrect one, but it still has issues. The problem is, in the phrase “A means B”, A refers to a word, a string of letters, but B doesn’t refer to a string of letters. It seems to refer to the concept B is expressing, to a meaning.
The problem with 1 seems to be that quotation can either refer to a word or to the meaning of a word. Let’s say double quotes refer to a word/phrase, while single quotes refer to the meaning of that phrase. Then the correct expression of the above would be this:
“Oculist” means ‘eye doctor’.
That seems to make perfect logical sense.[1]
To clarify, there is a common distinction between
a) term / sign / symbol / word,
b) meaning / intension,
c) reference object / extension.
An unquoted term refers to c), a quoted term refers to either a) or b). Hence my double / single quote disambiguation.
I write it this way too, and the ostensible “correct” way to do it slightly unnerves me every time I see it. It parses like mismatched brackets. The sentence wasn’t ended! There’s a compilation error!
I parse this as the correct special-case formatting for writing dialogue (not any verbal-speech quoting, specifically dialogue!). In all other cases, the comma should be outside the quotation marks.
This doesn’t parse as the correct format for dialogue, and would irk me if used this way. As to non-dialogue cases...
This also looks weird. I think in the single-sentence case, you can logically skip the dot, under the interpretation that you stopped quoting just before it.
What about a multi-sentence quote, though? In that case, including mid-quote dots but skipping the last one indeed feels off. Between the following two, the latter feels more correct:
That said, they both feel ugly. Honestly, it feels to me that you maybe shouldn’t be allowed inline multi-sentence quotes at all, outside the special case of dialogue? This feels most correct:
But of course, it’s also illogical. There should be a dot right after the quote! It’s pretty much the exact same thing as the first example.
For that matter, same with colons. Logically, something like this is the correct formatting:
I would be weirded out if someone wrote it this way, though. The standard way to write it, where you omit the dot, also irks me a bit, but less so. No real good options here, only lesser evils.
I’ve recently decided that colons can end a sentence. If I said
then in my mind it is OK to not have a period anywhere. So, colons can apparently end sentences. Therefore, we can correct the earlier-quoted eample by changing the comma to a colon:
I like this fine.
Preference: Logical > Illogical > Hyperlogical
Does that include a dislike of “”“scare quotes”””?
Hum, maybe single quotes feel better? Yeah, triple is weird to me.
Eg ‘scare quotes’
I find single to be too ambiguous, because single quotes can be used interchangeably with double quotes. In my mind the proper use of single quotes is to avoid ambiguity when there’s one quotation inside of another. However, maybe that’s rare enough that your suggestion is ok? I find that I like ‘scare quotes’ if and only if it is very clear to the reader. The reason “”“scare quotes””” appeals to me is that it is very “”“loud”””—like someone doing air-quotes with a really big hand gesture, plus doing a voice for emphasis.
Any thoughts on ‴scare quotes‴? Or perhaps “”scare quotes”″?
I have an old post on the scare quotes question: https://messymatters.com/scarequotes/
In short, I have the following cases where I claim you should not use quotes:
(0) of course no quotes for emphasis, (1) don’t use quotes to indicate that you’re not going to explain a word, (2) don’t try to distance yourself from a phrase by putting it in quotes, (3) use italics instead of quotes for introducing a term, unless it’s also a mention as opposed to a use of the term, in which case either is ok.
And that leaves the following as the remaining acceptable uses:
Quoting someone or otherwise referring to the literal string of characters
To indicate you don’t mean something literally — like adding a parenthetical “not really”
Sometime within the last 3 years, I also came to adopt what you call the “logical style”. In my memory, I figured it out independently (because if the thing being quoted is a sentence, it should be written like one normally writes a sentence), but soon I noticed that some other people (e.g. Tsvi) also do it this way, so perhaps it’s to some extent due to exposure below the threshold of conscious registration (or I’m misremembering).
(FWIW, triple quotes seem weird/ugly to me, but it’s also fairly likely maybe I’d get used to them after a few weeks.)
I tried to find other examples, but apparently only American English uses the American style, while all(?) other languages use the British style, which should probably be called the “Non-American” style.
If it were “the word ‘tomato’ refers to a red, savory fruit”, then it would be the perfect case of map/territory use of quotes.
I’m also constantly struggling with using quotes inside quotes, especially when the outer quote ends in the same place as the inner quote. Usually, I just use different quotes (“double” vs. ‘single’ vs. «angle»), but when there are multiple quotes in the same place, it looks ugly no matter what I do.
Angle-quotes seem better in this respect (like nested parentheses, they aren’t ambiguous (because the parentheses have a visually obvious direction, begin-paren vs end-paren, so we can match parentheses to their mates unambiguously)). However, they’re extremely uncommon in American English so I’d feel very weird using them, and also I don’t know how to type them conveniently.
Ideally, I’d want to use multiple sizes of angle-quotes, similarly to the multiply-sized parentheses available in Latex.
Of course, nested … I’m not sure what to call them … whatever this is:
works fine. (At least, it works fine if I edit my stuff on greaterwrong.com instead of lesswrong.com.)
I often use single quotes for ‘scare’ quotes, though not for any particular reason.
I also find the idea that the editor changed your punctuation from logical to illogical distressing and rude.