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!
“It isn’t magic,” she said.
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.
“It isn’t magic.”, she said.
This doesn’t parse as the correct format for dialogue, and would irk me if used this way. As to non-dialogue cases...
She said “It isn’t magic.”.
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:
As they said, “It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft”, and we shouldn’t forget that.
As they said, “It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft.”, and we shouldn’t forget that.
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:
As they said,
> It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft.
We shouldn’t forget that.
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:
They used various example sentences, such as:
> It isn’t magic. It’s witchcraft.
. And we shouldn’t forget that.
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
Here’s a picture:
[the picture]
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 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.