2:48 p.m. � 18 November 2003

In which punctuation marks cause our heroine's brain to request stress leave.

Pamie asked a question in her blog today which sparked quite a bit of discussion.

The question was a simple enough musing about the interaction of quotation marks and punctuation, but it elicited a bunch of confusing and, sometimes, conflicting comments over usage in the US, Britain, and Canada.

So I had an instant panic attack over whether I�ve right up until now.

Australian usage can be tough, drawing as it does on facets of both American and British style. It can be damn confusing, in fact, particularly since the Australian Government Style Manual seems to have been compiled by one whose mood was capricious, at best. (And, at worst, simply bloody-minded, rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation at the confusion to be created by his work years to come.)

Now, I don�t have Garner. Nor do I have the Chicago Manual of Style. (Though if people love me, they�ll remember that Christmas and my birthday are coming up, and the new Chicago manual is coming out, and that the nice kids at Folio Books do great gift vouchers.)

What I do have is the rather marvellous Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, compiled by the marvellous Pam Peters from Macquarie University.

I love its appendices best of all. Need to know when the Cambrian period was? Have a sudden burning desire to convert units of angular velocity? Pam knows, and she�ll tell you. (There are 9.55 revolutions/minute in one radian/second, by the way.)

Here�s what Pam has to say on the question of �Quotation marks with other punctuation.�

�Which other punctuation marks to use with quote marks, and where to locate them, are vexed and variable issues.�

Not a hopeful beginning.

Among other sources, she cites Britain�s Hart�s Rules, 1983, which boasts a title enough like Hart�s War to conjure the wonderful but very strange mental image of Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell poring over a large pile of linguistic source material and arguing about comma placement. With, you know, guns.

In discussing the placement of the final full stop in quotes, she says it�s �again a question on which editorial practices divide.� (And if you don�t know that I just spent five minutes trying to decide where to put the full stop in the previous sentence, then you don�t know me very well.)

In American English, the full stop is always placed inside. In British English, �the conventions are bewilderingly varied.� Hart says it depends on whether the closed quote is compete in itself, and completes the carrier sentence at the same time. If it does both, the full stop goes inside; if the quotation was only part of a sentence, the full stop is placed outside.

What I love is that the British have a standard for this. It�s British Standard 5261, by the way, by which the full stop only goes inside if the quotation stands by itself as a complete sentence.

Pam says that �the wastage of editorial time suggests there�s a lot to be said for a simple system,� but ultimately recommends that final punctuation for quote marks be treated the same way as for parentheses.

Which sent me scuttling back to �parenthesis,� which sent me on a ramble over to �brackets.� If the Cambridge has a major fault, apart from its predilection for US spellings of words like honour and colour, it�s shaky cross-referencing.

It turns out that I�m doing it right. And that the answers to Pamie�s questions, if she's hoping to impersonate an Australian, are probably:

That sign says �Stop�!

Did she tell you "No"?

I told her "Tuesday", but I was wrong.

Please note that I only omitted the quotation marks denoting Pamie�s original material to prevent a Linguo-from-the-Simpsons-style mishap involving my brain.


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