Commas, quotes - and communication
Recently, a colleague and I got into a debate about commas and quotes.
He had edited a document for a client and I was taking a second look at it to ensure consistency.
I came across a split quote. Something along these lines:
“Why there you are Johnny,” said Jeremy. “I’ve been wondering where you’d gotten to!”
I had something of a brain-freeze and decided that the comma after Johnny needed to be outside the quote marks.
I found a source on the net that backed up my assertion, made the change and then sent the document back to my colleague.
Thankfully, my colleague is not one to back down easily and did a little research of his own. Somewhat more thorough research!
It turned out that my colleague was right, and I was wrong. All’s fair in love and war, and it was a good learning exercise for both us.
But what I really wanted to share with you was the following extremely insightful observation from the World Wide Words site which I came across during the course of my own research:
“Nobody will misunderstand what you write because of where you choose to put your stops relative to quotation marks. A writer who fixes too much attention on the correctness of his punctuation, or a reader who does the same, is missing the point: the job of text is to communicate, not satisfy pedantic rule makers.”
This seems to me to be the key learning here. It’s all too easy to get bogged down in the minutiae sometimes, and lose sight of the big picture.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
It’s vital to keep sight of the bigger picture, whatever you’re writing. However, getting your point across clearly almost always means getting the details right. The rules of punctuation have evolved to assist clarity and are often crucial to the meaning. So I don’t think they should ever be ignored.
In the example of the quotations, no-one will misunderstand the quote, whether or not the commas is placed inside or outside the quotation marks. It’s just good practice to follow the standard conventions for your particular type of English - and be consistent. (There are different quotation conventions for American and British English.)
However, correct punctuation is absolutely crucial to the meaning in other sentences. How often have you been completely confused by a text message or email that has no capital letters and no stops or commas?
August 17th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
It’s also interesting to consider that language will only continue to evolve if new practises are introduced. Sticking rigidly to the “genetic code” of current grammar will bring it all to a crumbling halt. After all it wasn’t long ago that “Se hlāford bindeþ þone cnapan” was the perfect English and no doubt “l8tr m8″ will be in the future (it is a perfect successor due to its excellent reduction and optimisation!).
It’s fascinating that one would expect these steps to come from the “language professionals” industry, but I’m not sure how you follow communication guidelines while doing so. I guess that’s for another day