Warning: mini-rant ahead
For years I've maintained a quiet argument with American grammar-style rule-followers. This argument is different from my other style argument concerning Americanized dates (it should be the international standard YEAR-MONTH-DAY, not MONTH-DAY-YEAR) but that's fodder for a different post.
Despite that fact that I am American-born and American-educated my argument concerns the American practice of including as part of a quoted value whatever punctuation immediately follows that quote. For example, in the sentence:
Stephen said the name of his lawn business is "Yard Masters."
The business name itself almost certainly does *not* include a period and so was not actually part of the quote from Stephen. The practice of enveloping non-quoted punctuation into preceding quoted text may seem rather unimportant. In this example most people would assume the business name is "Yard Masters" with no period. Even if someone mistakenly believed a period was part of the business name it's hard to imagine any serious negative consequences of doing so.
People who deal with the necessary preciseness of computer code, however, should be at least somewhat irritated at this practice. Instead of quoting a business name, what if the sentence were:
Stephen said the code to disarm the explosive is "n0b!0w."
The inclusion of the non-quoted period as part of the quote now has very serious consequences.
When pressed with this dilemma the normal response from grammar experts is to restructure the text so that the quote is no longer at the end of the sentence, such as: Stephen said the code "n0b!0w" will disarm the explosive. This is an effective, though somewhat clunky, workaround. Unfortunately it is not a workaround you can depend on -- you will still get cases of people including quotes at the end of sentences (or immediately preceding a comma) so the issue persists. I was recently reminded of this in some Google technical help instructions:
Following American grammar convention results in incorrect information in Google's instructions. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en#zippy=%2Chow-do-i-opt-my-access-point-out-of-google-location-services |
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