VOTE NOW!

First, vote before you continue reading the material after the voting links. Next, if you respond by clicking on one of the voting links below, you agree that your response may be posted here, but your name and email address may not be shown. If you change your vote after reading all of the material below, please feel free to vote again.



So, why does this issue matter? It matters for at least 3 reasons:

  1. Foremost, with today's technology, periods and other punctuation are critical. In writing software user's guides, quoting a word or phrase and including punctuation within the quotes may flaw the instruction. For example, asking the user to enter "xyz." would be hopelessly wrong if the intent was to enter "xyz". Writing technological guides that adhere to archaic standards would muddle the documentation. In other words, it would hinder communication rather than facilitate it.
  2. But archaic standards already force erroneous communication. If you ask a person what they answered to this voting question, the correct punctuation for the question would be, "Did you vote 'yay' or 'nay?'" Verbally, "nay?" is pronounced differently and is different in meaning from "nay." The variation I am suggesting would be, "Did you vote 'yay' or 'nay'?"
  3. The rules themselves have long been confusing since there are 5 rules governing punctuation associated with quotation marks.
However, I am not alone in my seeking improvement in these rules. Please refer to the bottom of the page at this Purdue website. They seem to be very close to my usage:
Put a dash, question mark, or exclamation point within closing quotation marks when the punctuation applies to the quotation itself and outside when it applies to the whole sentence.

Philip asked, "Do you need this book?"

Does Dr. Lim always say to her students, "You must work harder"?

Sharon shouted enthusiastically, "We won! We won!"

I can't believe you actually like that song, "If You Wanna Be My Lover"!




© 2008 J. Keeran