Just to make it harder:
In one sense, you're writing a stream of symbols, in which the . appears strictly before or after the ".
But in another sense, you're writing something that will be typeset into a two-dimensional medium, such as a computer screen. The stream of symbols is source code that gets compiled into a visual presentation. Only part of that compilation process is under your control. You control the stream of input symbols. LessWrong's CSS styles (and the browser's defaults) control things like kerning and spacing. And the reader's GUI settings control things like subpixel antialiasing.
And, as it happens, when you write ". above and it's rendered on my screen, the dot ends up entirely beneath the quote, and when you write .", the dot is mostly beneath the quote.
This sort of thing is happening all the time.
Generations of typists were taught to use two spaces after a period; a standard that developed on monospaced typewriters. But typeset output in a proportional font almost always collapses adjacent spaces together: word spacing is not dictated by the number of space characters in the input stream. (Except where it is.)
Some writers experience frustration at seeing their "correct" double-spacing "broken" by modern typesetting. This is probably a deadweight loss of happiness; they would be better off not caring.
Sometimes, the author does need to take control of the whole typesetting pipeline, to preserve accuracy. That's why Knuth created TeX. Most writers don't have the problems that Knuth had, though.
Yeah, I messed around with Typst for the first time recently. There's a whole dang world out there!
Still, now I know. [...] Do you see what I had to do? Can you imagine how it probably hurt?
It's not a universal experience, thankfully. I think flow state is most useful for juggling pipelines for learning little things like that. Perhaps it's worth cultivating an attitude where you are not an "expert" at anything, if these are the side effects.
Yeah, for me it solves itself instantly once I actually notice it in any given case. I mostly try not to think of myself as an expert at stuff (luckily for that, I rarely am!), but there are weird psychological incentives with being a professional at stuff, I think.
Question marks and exclamation points go outside, unless they’re part of the sentence, and colons and semicolons always go outside.
An example of a sentence from the post that uses a colon is “It gets deeper than this, but the core problem remains the same”:
Surely nobody endorses putting the colon outside the quotes there! I feel like Opus/whoever is just assuming that people virtually never want to quote a piece of text that ends in a colon, rather than really wanting to endorse a different rule to the question mark case.
I can just make it look pretty and put commas and periods inside the quotation marks
Maybe it's from growing up with British English, but I think this looks much worse. Like unclosed or incorrectly closed parentheses.
It's grown on me as I've edited more technical stuff; growing up in the US literary tradition it always seemed elegant to put punctuation inside, though now that I read more stuff like LessWrong it does feel kinda imprecise/hand-wavey somehow. Like, wait a minute, that guy you're quoting didn't put a comma in there!
I think I’m an excellent editor. Because I believe that I’m great at editing, I have a bunch of other feelings:
This post is about that last one.
When quoting something inline,
as opposed to a block quote, like this,
punctuation gets tricky. Take the list above, and say I wanted to quote the last bullet point for some reason. I might format it (abridged) like “I presume… the basics”. It looks ugly, because the period is awkwardly standing around after the end of the quotation. It’d be more attractive to just type “I presume… the basics.” But technically that’s wrong, because the list I’m quoting didn’t have periods. Right?
It gets deeper than this, but the core problem remains the same:
And even if you just assiduously follow the decision procedure I’m gesturing toward, and put punctuation marks inside quotations when they existed in the source material, even if you’re structurally leveraging those punctuation marks for your original sentence in which they’re embedded, you have to contend with hypothetical purists who (I claim) would say it’s technically most correct to just never include punctuation in a quotation, unless you are actively quoting the author’s use of that punctuation, specifically.
Do you notice what I’m doing here? It’s subtle, and it’s not subtle. Part of me is desperately trying to show off that I’m a good editor, that I’m highly knowledgeable about this domain and flexing that knowledge via a bunch of nuance. But another part of me knows the truth. I’ll give that part the honor of a block quote.
This might just be a basic, easy, bread-and-butter rule, with objective prior art, where if I were a 19-year-old I’d just look it up and find Strunk and White settling the question once and for all. And if so, I don’t know that rule.
There’s a very easy way to find out if that’s true, if all my floundering and finagling and fretting is useless, and the question has a clear answer. I could - I should - just ask ChatGPT and Claude. If they agree with each other, they’re probably right. Then I’ll know. The only thing standing in my way is the feeling that I shouldn’t have to research this. That doing such a thing is so obviously for amateurs, and that surely, by now, I am no such thing.
Whatever. Let’s ask.
The models reached consensus. To quote from Claude 4.1 Opus:
Opus Explanation
U.S. Style (Traditional)
- Periods and commas: Always inside quotation marks, regardless of whether they're part of the original
- Question marks and exclamation points: Inside if part of the quote, outside if part of your sentence
- Colons and semicolons: Always outside
Example: She said it was "perfect," but I disagreed.
British/Logical Style
- All punctuation: Only inside if it's part of the original material being quoted
- This is more precise and preserves the integrity of quotations
Example: She said it was "perfect", but I disagreed.
Suddenly, I understand why I felt so weird and confused about this. I learned to write in an American literary style. But over years, my editing has gravitated toward more technical stuff. So my aesthetic instincts tell me “do it like this,” but my recent habits complain that “it’s not quite logical”.
Still, now I know. In American and non-legalistic/non-technical writing, I can just make it look pretty and put commas and periods inside the quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation points go outside, unless they’re part of the sentence, and colons and semicolons always go outside. Cool. Never would have guessed that last part, no matter how much I inflated my “expertise” like a threatened pufferfish.
I am now a 0.2% better editor. Do you see what I had to do? Can you imagine how it probably hurt? But I can honestly report, on the other end, that it hurts no longer.
Is there anything similar you should do, to likewise grow a little bit, today?
