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It is a matter of which mechanical style rules you choose to follow,
not a question of right or wrong. However, it is widely recognized
that when the text is to be entered into a computer, placing the
punctuation inside the quotes can lead readers to think it is part
of the text to be typed. For consistency, it may then be advisable
to punctuate menu commands the same way as entered text, with the
punctuation outside the quotes.
|> > The sentence
|> >
|> > First select "Edit", and then select "Cut".
|> >
|> >is perfectly okay. I believe that likewise,
|>
|> As a former English teacher, I do NOT find the above sentence
|> "okay." As a
|> person now forced to dabble in tech editing (as a part of my
|> contract job of production word processor), I have run across this
|> use of comma/period with quotation marks. Is this, indeed,
|> characteristic of technical writing? Or do the period and comma
|> belong within the quote marks, per formal writing? (I hope for the
|> latter; I hate to think that tech writing is also sloppy writing.)
|>
|> --
|> Dot James in San Jose, CA
|It all depends on which style guide you use..... I remember in grad
|school we had WARS over this
|issue!.............................................
| Jane Bergen
Tom Tadfor Little tlittle -at- lanl -dot- gov -or- telp -at- Rt66 -dot- com
technical writer/editor Los Alamos National Laboratory
