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In Ireland (and I presume Britain) the 'correct' method of writing the
sentence would be:
The girl said "Argghh!". The full stop relates to the whole sentence and
not just to the word inside the quotes, therefore it should be outside.
So the 'convention' referred to is only convention in certain areas. If
you presented the sentence to me as was, i.e. >The girl said "Arrgh.", I
would mark it incorrect.
But, as I say, it's a cultural thing.
Aoidin
-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Sampson [mailto:wfreds -at- CRUZIO -dot- COM]
Sent: 01 July 1999 05:28
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Re: Editor Please....
Lisa:
You wrote:
>I have often seen periods used outside of quotation marks as in the following
>example:
>
>The girl said "Arrrgh".
>
>This has appeared so often that I am now questioning my own understanding of
>puntuation rules which, as I recall, say that periods must be placed
within the
>quotation marks at the end of a sentence as in this example:
>
>The girl said "Arrgh."
>
The latter is correct.
This subject created ongoing discussion between me and my supervisor a
few
months ago. He accepted the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical
Publications as gospel, except on this one. He was afraid that a user
would
type *arrgh.* (including the period) if we told the user to type
"arrgh."
instead of "arrgh". I think this came from his background in programming
,
in which every bit of punctuation means something. Not that it doesn't
mean
anything grammatically. He also thought the period inside the quotation
marks "looked funny." I think it looks funny with the period outside the
quotation marks. But, that may be because I know what the convention is.
This seems like a case of there being a convention because either choice
might make sense, but we need to be consistent (don't we?). That's just
my
opinion, I could be wrong.
