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| Don’t do this. I beg you. |
When someone asks my opinion of how something should be punctuated, I typically go for finding out what the general practice is. In other words, I look at some major style guides and do exactly what they says. If I disagree with that style guide, I’ll do exactly what it says. Again, if you’re publishing your own stuff you can do whatever you damn well please, but if you want someone else to publish your stuff you’d better follow how they want it formatted. Let me give a couple examples:
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| Some noted authorities. |
Should there be one or two spaces after at the end of a sentence? (Spoiler alert: it’s one.[3]) The choice of one or two spaces represents two separate attempts to emulate typeset material while using a typewriter. When the typewriter was introduced, most books published in English used what is called loose spacing, there’s a lot of space after the end of a sentence. An em space, which is — wide. Books in that era often had generous margins and gutters too. Beautiful pages that really don’t have a lot of type on them. To emulate this on a typewriter, typists hit an additional space after the end of each sentence.
The French style was for tight spacing. They formatted their pages without a lot of space after a sentence. More than an en space –, but less than an em.[4] The idea was to create a page of uniform text color. And text color adds up to gray. Think of it as how a page would look if you took a badly focused photo of it. The French wanted it uniform, the English and Americans wanted it non-uniform, with little holes in their text. Then came World War II.[5]
With paper shortages due to the war, there was a desire to cram as many words onto the page as possible. Goodbye gutters. Goodbye margins. Goodbye extra space after sentence. They were probably people who wanted to go to the old style of page design after the war. The answer to them was no. The war had come, the war had gone, but French spacing was here to stay.[6]
In the late 80s came the desktop publishing revolution. I was in that revolution. In the mid–1980s I was doing desktop publishing. I have produced camera ready copy. In order to make the camera-ready copy look like something that was set in physical type, I needed to emulate tight spacing. When I learn to type, I learned two spaces after the end of each sentence. Only a few years later I was retraining myself to type on the single space after each sentence. But it’s just a convention.
A few years ago I took an extension class for which the professor insisted that all papers needed to have two spaces after each period. Her class, her rules. That said, I had to retrain myself (again) to be able to type that way.[7] She admitted that her own editor chided her for sending in manuscripts with two spaces after a period, though in these days of digital submission, at least that’s an easy find and replace. Find all double spaces and convert them to a single space. But the question still occurs to me that if you want to have your stuff published why would you make them do this extra step? For those who say they can’t this do, I wonder what they when typing abbreviations. Do they type an extra space after Dr., Mr., or oz.?
Onward to one of the other type of graphic conundrums, the quotation mark. Should commas and periods go inside or outside quotation marks? We return to our noted authorities and the rules are pretty clear. Generally. The American convention is that all the small punctuation (commas and periods) slide in under the closing quotation mark. It’s tidier. The British convention is to place punctuation outside the closing quotation mark. They also use single quotation marks where American use double.
Like Benjamin Dreyer, I agree there’s a certain sense to British practice, but there’s also a certain sense to American practice. To quote Dryer: “I find the sight of those periods and commas hanging outside tuition marks saddening.”[8] It creates this ugly little notch of white space, between the last word and the punctuation mark. To me it makes the punctuation a bit unconnected from its sentence. There’s not a lot of visual difference between a comma after a quotation mark (word”,) and one with an extra space before it (word ,). In The Elements of Style we find: Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there.[9] This is likely one of E. B. White’s additions, as it does not appear in Strunk’s edition of 1917.[10]
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| You (who do this: ”.) are here. |
If you’re an American using British punctuation convention,[12] are you also using British spellings? I thought not. I have not checked with any copyeditor on this question, but I suspect that if you’re an American who is submitting to an American publication using own version of quotation marks and end punctuation, the copy editor will hate you. Treat the copyeditor right. Do you really want someone to go through your entire manuscript marking a circled tr every time you have a quotation mark with a comma or a period?
All this said, all other punctuation stays on one side or the other of a quotation mark, depending on its source.
“Edward E. Tanner III (Patrick Dennis), better known for Auntie Mame, collaborated on the memoir Guestward Ho!” The exclamation mark is from Tanner and Barbara Hooton, not me.
Be good to your copy editor. If you want to break out of the herd, do it with your writing, not your arrangement of spaces or quotation marks.
A final thought on citation formats. While there clear practices on spaces after sentences (one) and periods and commas with closing quotation marks (the quotation mark goes last) when I worked for a researcher it seemed almost that every journal had its own house citation format, none of which agreed with the MLA style I learned in college. No one ever debates these. Those who are writing for publications with house guidelines for citations just follow them. Do as they do. Follow the rules.
[Post in haste, edit later. I've given this post a bit of copy editing. It could probably use more.]
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Would that be “aypitomee”? I’m not sure. ↩
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Please—I beg you—do not make “aypitomee” part of your house style guide. ↩
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Why do I say “one”? I checked submission guides. Editors have the issue that if all submissions are produced under the same guidelines, they can figure out how things will go on a page before they get there. Two spaces mess this up. And they have to go through and take them out. ↩
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The em space and dash get their name from being the width of a M. The en space and dash get their name from being the width of an N. (But it’s usually half an em.) While you’re down here, the em dash, en dash, and hyphens (the narrowest of them) have specific uses. En dashes are good to separate dates, so 1708–1742, not 1708–1742. ↩
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WWII was not fought over typographic standards, though prior to WWII, the Nazi Party had banned blackletter types (which Hitler thought Jewish) going for more modern typefaces, particularly san-serifs. The Fraktur types were the typographic continuation of textura, which Renaissance scribes called “Gothic,” because they thought it came from Germany (it developed in Italy). “Roman” hands were from the Carolingian Empire, that is, they came from Germany. ↩
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Seriously. Page margins you could put a thumb into and never worry that you were going to cover the text. ↩
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Any typing I did that wasn’t for class had one space after each sentence (well, not at the end of paragraphs, of course), so retraining to never again type two spaces after a sentence was easy. ↩
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Dryer, Benjamin. Dryer’s English (New York: Random House, 2019), 83. ↩
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Strunk, Willam F., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd ed.(New York: Macmillan, 1979), 36. Repeated in the 4th edition (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon, 2000) with an update in the examples, still on page 36. ↩
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https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 ↩
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I chose midway between New York and London. I’m not trying to claim that these are the two poles of the English language, although they are two major centers (centres if you’re British) of publishing in the English-speaking world. (No disrespect intended to Toronto or Sydney.) ↩
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Let’s dismiss the perception that British English is somehow “more correct” than American English. Not only is “more correct” not really a thing, British claims of American linguistic novelty are usually unsupported by history. The spellings “color” and “honor” were perfectly acceptable to the typesetters of the First Folio (Shakespeare’s collected plays, 1623), at which point there was no United States. ↩
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