Comments on: Punctuation Errors: American and British Quotation Marks

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:38:04 +0000

This is probably too late and a little silly, but in response to lawyerjourno: Punctuation was invented, because the alphabet by itself does not encode the entire speech signal.

European languages use mechanisms such as tone, stress, and pauses to indicate sentence structure. They succeed at this only partially, but punctuation does help disambiguate a lot of sentences.

BTW, the writing you write yourself might seem to make sense to you, because you have the intonation, etc. in your mind, that is, your mind is filling in information that does not appear in the writing. That’s why it’s better if a different person proofreads your writing.

By: mon

mon — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:08:16 +0000

I’m American, but I must say that I’ve always thought that the British method makes more sense. In the future, if anyone here corrects me on my stubborn adherence to British English, I’ll just tell them I was schooled in the UK.

By: AltMichael

AltMichael — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:59:01 +0000

Being an American, I follow the American convention, except—and I’ve heard different claims about its correctness—when the quotation marks are used to mean that we writing about word or phrase itself instead of what it stands for. Somehow it just seems incorrect for me.

For example: Native speakers of a language do not have an “accent”.
Or is it?: …do not have an “accent.”

Also, English is a world language. I really wish the US, UK, and all these other countries would get together set a single standard for punctuation and spelling. I don’t care if means even WE have to adopt some new conventions.

By: Blair Peery

Blair Peery — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:15 +0000

@Sarah: I think that the matter of the inverted commas was not mentioned so as to focus on the location of the more pedestrian commas in such lists.

By the way, inverted commas are referred to in American English as ’single quotes’, as opposed to “double quotes”. An American who refers to something in quotes almost always means double quotes. I think few here in the States would know what the phrase “inverted commas” would mean.

@Discussion at Large:
While I am an American and aware of the American system, I believe any system is amenable to change. Here is how I would write the list:

I like the words “friendly”, “happy”, and “joyous”.

I use the justification of logic; that the quoted item should not include anything extraneous. My usage turns out to be the same as the British usage (except for the single quotes), but I wasn’t aware of the British preferences before today. It is a happy coincidence.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:23:36 +0000

Perhaps I have missed this point elsewhere but in British English we use what are called inverted commas when enclosing text that has not been directly quoted or to emphasise a word or words.

eg. as in a previous example, the list would be ‘friendly’, ‘happy’, ‘joyous’…