
Are American commas and periods destined to be on the outside, looking in?
By Ben Yagoda
Consider two sentences:
Anna said updating the guide was “a difficult and time-consuming task.”
Anna said updating the guide was “a difficult and time-consuming task”.
Their meaning is obviously the same. The subtle difference is in the punctuation at the end. The first, in which the period comes before the closing quotation marks, is American style. The second, in which the period comes at the end, is British and is sometimes referred to as “logical punctuation.” In fact, the example comes from The Guardian’s style guide, which states, “Place full points and commas inside the quotes for a complete quoted sentence; otherwise the point comes outside.”
Here’s another example of the British way, from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags (1942):
They began singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘We’ll hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, and ‘The Quartermaster’s Store’.
(British style also tends to use inverted commas for quotation marks, like ‘this,’ while Americans “double” the marks, but that subject is well beyond the scope of this essay.)
Before the end of the 19th century, the conventions on both sides of the Atlantic were a bit fast and loose. Writing in 1859, Henry Beadnell, an English printer and typographer, endorsed the placement of the first comma in this passage:
… to a man of what Plato calls “universal sympathies,” and even more to the plain, ordinary citizens of this world …
Beadnell averred that, “for the sake of neatness … commas and periods should always precede quotation marks.”
Indeed, this style is sometimes known as “printers’ quotation” or “typesetters’ quotation” and was apparently initially promoted by those artisans for aesthetic reasons. As Rosemary Feal, then the executive director of the Modern Language Association, commented to me in an email, it was instituted “to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space).” In America, the style was close to universally adopted by the turn of the 20th century.
But across the Atlantic it was still the Wild West, as it were. The Fowler brothers devote five and a half pages to the matter in The King’s English (1906), noting that “general usage, besides being illogical, is so inconsistent, different writers improving upon it in special details that appeal to them.” Their recommendation, for the most part, amounted to the current British system—though “we must warn the reader that it is not the system now in fashion.” They mock Beadnell and others for holding that “neatness is the sole consideration” and conclude, “Argument on the subject is impossible; it is only a question whether the printer’s love for the old ways that seem to him so neat, or the writer’s and reader’s desire to be understood and to understand fully, is to prevail.”
This had not prevailed by 1926 when one of the brothers, H. W., wrote in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage that while the outside-quotation-marks style was “right,” the inside-quote-marks style was still “usual.” As late as 1947, Eric Partridge could (disapprovingly) note in Usage and Abusage “a tendency among printers to put the period … and comma inside the ‘quotes’”—though “careful printers are beginning to follow the more logical rule.” Not too long after that, the “logical rule” prevailed in Britain once and for all.
In America, meanwhile, only rarely was the consensus challenged. The only early example I’ve found is the American Bar Association Journal, whose use of the British style so infuriated a reader named Sidney Alderman (who had been a member of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg war crimes trial) that, in 1950, he wrote and submitted a letter of some 1,100 words to protest it. “I can hardly enjoy the excellent articles,” he maintained, “because the periods and commas dangling outside the quotes scratch my eyes like grains of sand or hot cinders, and I spend my time proofreading them back inside the quotes, losing the substance of the articles.” (A perusal of the journal’s archives shows that it was still using the style in 1970 but had dropped it by 1980. I hope Sidney Alderman was alive to see the change.)
Lawyers being famously literal and logical, it’s not surprising that the editors of the ABA Journal should have gone this punctuational route. Those traits are also associated with people who work with computers, and this cohort is probably mainly responsible for the rise of the British style in America. In 1991, Eric Raymond wrote in The New Hacker’s Dictionary,
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don’t belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”.
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.”
But that would be very bad—because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi, dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!
The horror.
Continuing on the logical/literal theme, Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of North America, has adopted the British way. The first item under “Punctuation” in its style sheet says,
The second member of a pair of quotation marks should precede any other adjacent mark of punctuation, unless the other mark is part of the quoted matter: The word means ‘cart’, not ‘horse’.
The other notable American user is Pitchfork, the online music magazine. A review there notes,
Covers on the LP [from Iggy Pop] include the Beatles’ “Michelle”, Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”, and tracks from Serge Gainsbourg and Henri Salvador.
I emailed then–managing editor Mark Richardson to ask why Pitchfork did it that way, and he responded that it was “partly because it makes sense when the quoted titles don’t contain punctuation (which I guess is why it’s called ‘logical’) and partly because it was absorbed from reading the UK music press.”
But the biggest current user of logical punctuation is Wikipedia, which was founded in America but whose single English-language version is of course read all over the world. The site’s style guide requires that periods and commas be kept “inside the quotation marks if they apply only to the quoted material and outside if they apply to the whole sentence.”
Thus the Wikipedia entry on Frank Sinatra reports that in 1946 he
released “Oh! What it Seemed to Be”, “Day by Day”, “They Say It’s Wonderful”, “Five Minutes More”, and “The Coffee Song” as singles.
Despite all this, there are no signs of the American style diminishing in professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any place adhering to Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, or Associated Press guidelines. But in copyeditor-free zones—the web and emails and texts—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in.
To take one example out of millions, or maybe billions, Conan O’Brien once tweeted,
Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfortunately, in this case “darndest” means “incriminating”.
I can say from personal experience that, since the early 2000s, the college students I’ve taught have overwhelmingly favored logical punctuation. When first presented with this, I would make “humorous” remarks to the effect that we were in Delaware, not Liverpool. When that didn’t make a difference, I instituted a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions. For the most part, that hasn’t helped either.
The reason the students and others are so drawn to the style isn’t that they’re aping Pitchfork or Wikipedia, much less imitating the British. Rather, they use it because, as the name says, it’s logical. These writers follow the logic because they don’t know the American rules, which is in turn because they don’t read very much edited prose. Instead, they read plenty of tweets and texts and Instagram comments that put periods and commas outside.
I predict an even more pronounced separation between official and unofficial practice. That is, for the foreseeable future, prose published by established entities will follow the traditional rules, while everyone else will follow logic.
Ben Yagoda G’91 is the author, most recently, of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, from which this essay is excerpted with permission of Princeton University Press.