Punctuation & Quotation Conventions
6Thane Ruthenis
4abramdemski
4cubefox
4plex
2abramdemski
2plex
2abramdemski
3dreeves
2Mateusz Bagiński
2cubefox
2Roman Malov
1Roman Malov
2abramdemski
1Trevor Hill-Hand
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She used the phrase "absolute magic".
I write it this way too, and the ostensible "correct" way to do it slightly unnerves me every time I see it. It parses like mismatched brackets. The sentence wasn't ended! There's a compilation error!
"It isn't magic," she said.
I parse this as the correct special-case formatting for writing dialogue (not any verbal-speech quoting, specifically dialogue!). In all other cases, the comma should be outside the quotation marks.
"It isn't magic.", she said.
This doesn't parse as the correct format for dialogue, and would irk me if used this way. As to non-dialogue cases...
She said "It isn't magic.".
This also looks weird. I think in the single-sentence case, you can logically skip the dot, under the interpretation that you stopped quoting just before it.
What about a multi-sentence quote, though? In that case, including mid-quote dots but skipping the last one indeed feels off. Between the following two, the latter feels more correct:
As they said, "It isn't magic. It's witchcraft", and we shouldn't forget that.
As they said, "It isn't magic. It's witchcraft.", and we shouldn't forget that.
That said, they both feel ugly. Honestly, it feels to me that you maybe shouldn't be allowed inline multi-sentence quotes at all, outside the special case of dialogue? This feels most correct:
As they said,
> It isn't magic. It's witchcraft.
We shouldn't forget that.
But of course, it's also illogical. There should be a dot right after the quote! It's pretty much the exact same thing as the first example.
For that matter, same with colons. Logically, something like this is the correct formatting:
They used various example sentences, such as:
> It isn't magic. It's witchcraft.
. And we shouldn't forget that.
I would be weirded out if someone wrote it this way, though. The standard way to write it, where you omit the dot, also irks me a bit, but less so. No real good options here, only lesser evils.
2As they said,
It isn't magic. It's witchcraft.
We shouldn't forget that.
I've recently decided that colons can end a sentence. If I said
Here's a picture:
[the picture]
then in my mind it is OK to not have a period anywhere. So, colons can apparently end sentences. Therefore, we can correct the earlier-quoted eample by changing the comma to a colon:
As they said:
It isn't magic. It's witchcraft.
We shouldn't forget that.
I like this fine.
I particularly find definitions confusing. Which one is logically correct?
- "Oculist" means "eye doctor".
- "Oculist" means eye doctor.
- Oculist means "eye doctor".
- Oculist means eye doctor.
I would say 1 is the least incorrect one, but it still has issues. The problem is, in the phrase "A means B", A refers to a word, a string of letters, but B doesn't refer to a string of letters. It seems to refer to the concept B is expressing, to a meaning.
The problem with 1 seems to be that quotation can either refer to a word or to the meaning of a word. Let's say double quotes refer to a word/phrase, while single quotes refer to the meaning of that phrase. Then the correct expression of the above would be this:
- "Oculist" means 'eye doctor'.
That seems to make perfect logical sense.[1]
To clarify, there is a common distinction between
a) term / sign / symbol / word,
b) meaning / intension,
c) reference object / extension.An unquoted term refers to c), a quoted term refers to either a) or b). Hence my double / single quote disambiguation. ↩︎
I find single to be too ambiguous, because single quotes can be used interchangeably with double quotes. In my mind the proper use of single quotes is to avoid ambiguity when there's one quotation inside of another. However, maybe that's rare enough that your suggestion is ok? I find that I like 'scare quotes' if and only if it is very clear to the reader. The reason """scare quotes""" appeals to me is that it is very """loud""" -- like someone doing air-quotes with a really big hand gesture, plus doing a voice for emphasis.
Any thoughts on '''scare quotes'''? Or perhaps ""scare quotes""?
1I have an old post on the scare quotes question: https://messymatters.com/scarequotes/
In short, I have the following cases where I claim you should not use quotes:
(0) of course no quotes for emphasis, (1) don't use quotes to indicate that you're not going to explain a word, (2) don't try to distance yourself from a phrase by putting it in quotes, (3) use italics instead of quotes for introducing a term, unless it's also a mention as opposed to a use of the term, in which case either is ok.
And that leaves the following as the remaining acceptable uses:
- Quoting someone or otherwise referring to the literal string of characters
- To indicate you don't mean something literally — like adding a parenthetical "not really"
Sometime within the last 3 years, I also came to adopt what you call the "logical style". In my memory, I figured it out independently (because if the thing being quoted is a sentence, it should be written like one normally writes a sentence), but soon I noticed that some other people (e.g. Tsvi) also do it this way, so perhaps it's to some extent due to exposure below the threshold of conscious registration (or I'm misremembering).
(FWIW, triple quotes seem weird/ugly to me, but it's also fairly likely maybe I'd get used to them after a few weeks.)
I tried to find other examples, but apparently only American English uses the American style, while all(?) other languages use the British style, which should probably be called the "Non-American" style.
A "tomato" is a red, savory fruit.
If it were "the word 'tomato' refers to a red, savory fruit", then it would be the perfect case of map/territory use of quotes.
I'm also constantly struggling with using quotes inside quotes, especially when the outer quote ends in the same place as the inner quote. Usually, I just use different quotes ("double" vs. 'single' vs. «angle»), but when there are multiple quotes in the same place, it looks ugly no matter what I do.
Angle-quotes seem better in this respect (like nested parentheses, they aren't ambiguous (because the parentheses have a visually obvious direction, begin-paren vs end-paren, so we can match parentheses to their mates unambiguously)). However, they're extremely uncommon in American English so I'd feel very weird using them, and also I don't know how to type them conveniently.
Ideally, I'd want to use multiple sizes of angle-quotes, similarly to the multiply-sized parentheses available in Latex.
Of course, nested ... I'm not sure what to call them ... whatever this is:
To quote a thing,
a thing
works fine. (At least, it works fine if I edit my stuff on greaterwrong.com instead of lesswrong.com.)
I often use single quotes for 'scare' quotes, though not for any particular reason.
I also find the idea that the editor changed your punctuation from logical to illogical distressing and rude.
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