alt Hacker NewsIn English we don’t write commas or periods outside the quotes. The proper way is to write them inside the quotation.
- “defect,” a flaw, an error.
- about giving a dam.”
Don’t get me started about “for purposes TBD later.”
Replies
The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."
your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".
But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.
That’s only the case for American English. British English places periods and commas outside the quotes, unless part of a literal quotation.