User:Liz at EditNation

This page belongs to Liz at EditNATION.com.

I am having a dispute with the guy (whose moniker "Hoary" is pretty indicative of where he's at!) about the page dedicated to Strunk & White's famous The Elements of Style, written by two AMERICAN authors. The authors, on page 36, plainly state their policy regarding the placement of commas and quotation marks: commas are to be placed "inside" quotation marks. The policy is stated and then illustrated over and over again in the text. The same policy, though unspoken (perhaps they thought it didn't need to be spoken), is followed with periods. Yet, this Hoary guy places the commas and periods in the Elements of Style listing OUTSIDE the quotation marks, basically inventing a style at odds with the book. I went in (after thinking "What an idiot!") and corrected his mistakes, which are littered all through the page, and yet he went back, changed the corrections, and referred me to an obscure punctuation reference, which I have not bothered to pursue. In American English, periods and commas always go OUTSIDE quotation marks. There are no exceptions. There are certainly no examples in The Elements of Style when that is not the case. "Hoary" doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.