Quotation Marks Pairing with Other Punctuation. Duhh.

There seems to be another confusing trend afoot. Don't worry. I'm not going to nag you about their using italics for internal thought. I gave you the whys and wherefores in The Frugal Editor-- http://budurl.com/TheFrugalEditor -- and mentioned it several times since then. Enough is enough already!

 

This is a punctuation fiasco that aims at taking one of America's simplest punctuation rules (style choices) and making pudding of them. You're sure to see folks putting a period or a comma after a closing quotation mark if you haven't seen it already.

 

June Casagrande, author of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies ( http://budurl.com/grammarsnobs ) urges you not to be taken in by it.  I think the trend may be picking up steam with more and more people reading books published in the UK or by UK authors. We, unfortunately, think that what they do has to be more correct--or classier--than what we do. After all, they do have a few hundred years on us in terms of the European aspect of our culture.

 

But our most prestigious publishers have for years followed the general guideline of putting your punctuation (except for colons and semicolons) inside the closing quotation marks. Let's band together and foil the grammar conspirators (or snobs!).

 

What is right for the English may only be ostentatious for Americans. Our punctuation is supposed to be a reading aid, not stick out like a hammered thumb.

 

 

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson edits, consults. and speaks on issues of publishing. Find her The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (How To Do It Frugally series of book for writers). Learn more about her other authors' aids at www.howtodoitfrugally.com/writers_books.htm , where writers will find lists and other helps including Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips on the Resources for Writers page. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at her Sharing with Writers blog. She tweets writers' resources at www.twitter.com/frugalbookpromo .

Quotation Marks, Pictures and the Beginning of a Rant

My daughter writes, "I know incorrectly used quotation marks are a pet peeve of yours. Better look at this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/7-awesome-examples-of-unn_n_330321.html?slidenumber=zubE9QcPQnA%3D "

I loved it. All in pictures. Having said that, it didn't really cover those quotation marks so many use around slang or colloquialisms when they don't need to. Hey! We "know" those words! See the quotations around "know?" Don't need them there, either!

Oh, fear my daughter may have gotten me on a roll here. The start of a rant! Quick, click on the link for the pictures before I get started. (-:



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Carolyn Howard-Johnson edits, consults and speaks on issues of publishing. Find her The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978515870. Learn more about her other authors' aids at www.howtodoitfrugally.com, where writers will find lists and other helps on the Resources for Writers page. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at her Sharing with Writers blog.

Punctuating Close Quotes in Four Easy Lessons

My loyal Frugal Editor readers, I decided to break some of Boyd Sutton's great article on Close Quotes into a few easy doses. I believe that sometimes the mistake good grammar teachers make is forcing too much on students in one lesson, just because the text they use puts all that information into one chapter. So here is Boyd's "Punctuating Close Quotes Part I, "Closing Quotes with Periods and Commas." And thank you Boyd, for contributing to The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor once again!

Oh, by the way. The easiest way to get other grammar, formatting, and other editing essentials from this blog is to subscribe! See the little subscription box in the left column.

By Boyd Sutton, editor of WRWA Journal

A good friend who was working on publicity for the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association's Spring Conference in Siren, WI, brought to my attention that we had somehow managed to post some badly punctuated prose on our Web site. It’s a bit embarrassing for a writers’ Web site to get the basics of punctuation so wrong. But such mistakes are common, even among experienced writers. I see them every time I process Club News and other submissions for the Journal. Accordingly, I thought it might be useful to give everyone a brief reminder on some of the basic rules of punctuation, especially "Punctuation Marks and Closing Quotations."

Close Quotes with Periods and Commas

American style (they do it differently in England) requires that periods and commas always (repeat, always—-no exceptions) be inserted before the closing quotation marks. This is so whether the quotation involves an entire sentence, a phrase, or a single word.

Wrong: He told me I was “too harsh”.
Right: He told me I was “too harsh.”

The most frequent error I see in submissions is when citing a publication by an author.

Wrong: Her article, “The Bloom is Off the Roses”, was recently published in What’s Playing magazine.

Right: Her article, “The Bloom is Off the Roses,” was recently published in What’s Playing magazine.

The same problem occurs when someone cites several publications.

Wrong: Gina had three poems published last month: “Silence”, “Laughter”, and “Joy”.

Right: Gina had three poems published last month: “Silence,” “Laughter,” and “Joy.”

Always, always, always put periods and commas before the closing quotation marks.
Tomorrow we'll cover Colons and Semicolons.

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Boyd Sutton is producer and editor of the Wisconsin Writers’ Journal, a quarterly publication of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association . His articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in newspapers and magazines. He is a freelance editor and has won many writing awards, including the Jade Ring, Wisconsin’s most prestigious writing award, for his essay, “Owning Your Own Time—Managing Your Retirement.” He may be reached at journal@wrwa.net. This article first appeared in the 2008 winter edition of the Wisconsin Writers’ Journal.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson edits, consults and speaks on issues of publishing. Find her The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978515870. Learn more about her other authors' aids at www.howtodoitfrugally.com, where writers will find lists and other helps on the Resources for Writers page. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at her Sharing with Writers blog.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogure Sharp

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson


1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue—your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing our social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long-winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success on Amazon.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more.