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Subject:Re: Period/comma then close quote, or vice versa? From:"T.W. Smith" <techwordsmith -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 7 Apr 2005 09:34:22 -0400
For US audiences, put the period and comma inside the closing quote
unless it would be misleading.
For example, '... then press "Enter."' (quote reversal intentional
here) would be fine, because even though the Enter key on your
keyboard does not contain a period/full stop, the meaning is clear.
However, if you are reproducing programming syntax, it might make
sense to leave the comma, period outside the quotes, for clarity.
Changing fonts is nice and all, but I find changing fonts often does
not do a good job at highlighting trailing punctuation.
Anyway, for the most part, this means just leave the period and comma
within the closing quotes for US audiences.
On Apr 7, 2005 9:28 AM, Anthony Davey <ant -at- ant-davey -dot- com> wrote:
>
> Mark,
>
> CMS has to be right in this case, whatever US convention may be, from my
> UK perspective as well, "Type 'GO.'" means, type the letter G then the
> letter O, then a period. In 'English', of course, there'd be a period
> (sorry 'full stop') after the second " as well.
>
> I've got Sun's "Read Me First", which says:
> For quotes. Do not enclose verbatim commands, system messages, file
> names... In some cases, a reader can be misled into thinking that the
> quotation marks are an integral part of the text that is to be typed.
> Since GO is an input variable, I'd be inclined to go with Bonnie's
> suggestion that a different font is what would work best.
>
> But I'm interested to know in what context in a tech manual you would be
> quoting speech in such a fashion?
======
T.
Remember, this is online. Take everything with a mine of salt and a grin.
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