User talk:Colonies Chris/Archive/2009/Jun

Please stop; Proper formatting for commas/quotation marks

Please stop moving commas outside of quotation marks, when they belong within quotation marks, as you did throughout the Jesse Levine article. That is simply incorrect. The way they were, which you changed in many instances throughout the article, was correct.--Ethelh (talk) 21:47, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

My edits were correct and in line with the manual of style - see the heading "Inside or outside" at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Quotation marks. Colonies Chris (talk) 22:05, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I moved your response above, to keep our converation in one place, so it is easier for us and others to follow.

Even that approach, which does not accord with the rules in the standard English grammar and usage books referred to by Wikipedia, suggests that the usage you changed (where the comma had been placed within the quotation marks) was fine as it was. That is because the sense of those sentences had ended, what was quoted communicates (as your Wiki Manual calls it) a "a complete sentence," and it was therefore appropriate to put a comma there (as it would have been appropriate to place a period, had there not been a "__ said," following....--Ethelh (talk) 22:21, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

The relevant part of the MoS is this statement:

When quoting a sentence fragment that ends in a period, some judgment is required: if the fragment communicates a complete sentence, the period can be placed inside. The period should be omitted if the quotation is in the middle of a sentence. Correct: Martha said, "Come with me", and they did.

(my bolding)

That exactly matches the changes I made. For example, I changed

"That first pro title was a big deal for me," Levine said.

to

"That first pro title was a big deal for me", Levine said.

The words quoted originally constituted a complete sentence, but the MoS calls for the full stop to be removed. The remainder of the sentence then follows the separating comma, which is placed outside the quotation marks. Colonies Chris (talk) 23:01, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I disagree with your reading. "That first pro title was a big deal for me" is not a sentence fragment. Nor was it placed "in the middle of a sentence," in your above example.--Ethelh (talk) 23:35, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Quite right - those quoted words were not a sentence fragment, they were a complete sentence. That's exactly what I said, and that's the specific case that's covered by the example in the MoS. The point of all this is that the comma goes outside the quotes because it is not part of the quotation - only the words are being quoted. This is what the MoS describes as 'logical quotation'. It would make no sense to replace the ending period that would have been there in the original quoted sentence by a comma that wouldn't have been there. The comma is part of the rest of the sentence, not part of the quotation. The only reason you see it done differently in some publications is that they prefer the look of the comma inside the quotes - for them it's purely a visual style choice, but Wikipedia chooses accuracy over style. Colonies Chris (talk) 09:04, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Ping

Check your email, if you haven't lately (as in the past few hours). Dabomb87 (talk) 15:30, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

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