Catherine Bushby's List: Grammar

• f you put a period or comma inside quotation marks, you are wrongly suggesting that the period or comma is part of the quoted material, and thus you have "changed" it.
• hat is, prose published by established entities will follow the traditional rules, while everyone else will follow logic. As a wise man once said, "You pays your money, and you takes your choice".

• A punctuation paradigm is shifting.
• ncriminating".
• But the main reason is that the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least the 1960s a common designation for that style has been "logical punctuation."
• t was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)."

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