http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nerd-fight

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[–] 48 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I feel that punctuation that was not present in the quoted source should not appear between the quote marks.

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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago

    Conversely, punctuation that was part of the quoted source needs to be included in the quotes.

    The reason there’s room for argument is because there’s no simple rule that adequately covers all scenarios.

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  • [–] 28 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    If it was a period I can see the argument (and I'm still not clear on what's right), but a comma? I can't see any reason why you would include a comma within the quotes. Even if the quote had a comma in the original, you're quoting the part before the comma.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I mean, I'm pretty certain I was taught in school to do things like this:

    "It's only a block away," she said.

    And, yeah. I definitely prefer (all else being equal):

    "It's only a block away", she said.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Logically I prefer it but visually, I hate the way the quotation mark makes a weird space before the comma

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Hrm. What would you think of a ligature or unicode trick that would let you make roughly-speaking on "character" that put the quotes directly above the comma and was only as wide as the wider of the two individual characters? I could maybe get behind that.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    well if you do it the other way there's a space between the quote and the letter so the only difference is if the space is above or below (personally I prefer "", probably because of coding)

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Whether you follow the rule or not, you need to have learned it.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    How can I learn a rule I've never heard of? Or ever used, I've never quoted something and needed to keep the comma in. Give me an example.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I still will change the ones on the right to the left ones if I paste something in and it has them. I think it's trauma from the days of early HTML coding and not wanting to do all the extra coding for each right and left mark.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Wait, is this about where to put the comma when writing a sentence or a snippet of code?

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago

    People writing English insist the rule on the sentence makes no sense and is different from the one on code.

    If you ask me, I'd suggest we use the code rule in writing too, and make sure to copy punctuation from the original, just to make that people angry.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    We have a semicolon, why not a semi-close-quote?

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