“For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.”
Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? Read what Ben Yagoda has to say at Slate Magazine.
We still have “rules” of punctuation!?
My rule of thumb is, “If a sentence is wholly with-in quotation marks, I punctuate with-in the marks”.
The exception to this is, if a sentence begins with, “He said,”.
( note that the third comma in the above sentence stands with “He said” because it is an integral part of that word group)
i.e. He said, “I have nothing further to add to this conversation.”
The answer to the bolded question is: NO
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
I consider this an improvement. I notice that I put the comma or period inside of the quotes when it is actually part of the quote, and outside of the quotes when it is added solely to make the sentence grammatical.
Thus:
Source: It is done.
Inside: He said “It is done.”
Outside: Did he say “It is done”?
Outside: He said “It is done”, and I agree with him.
Only the case of a period, would I be staying true to the original source, so that is the only case where the punctuation would go inside the quotes.
I don’t think bloggers and teens are placing the comma outside the quotation marks because they are thinking deeply about the best ways to delineate quotations. They are doing it because they didn’t bother to learn the rules of grammar and punctuation.
Why should we let the ignorant dictate the way we do things? Ugh. I guess we should all name our kids Bentley and Nevaeh and watch The Bachelor and Jersey Shore too, then.
Oh, and elect Sarah Palin President.
“Rules” of American style aside, I always thought it seemed stupid to put a punctuation mark inside the quotation marks unless it was part of the phrase being quoted. So, I guess that means I prefer the “logical” or British style. It’s so irksome for me to make myself punctuate the “American” way, I often rearrange my sentence simply to avoid the issue.