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Redlemon · 10-15-2004, 06:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roboshark

The question mark goes inside the quotes. Just like a full stop or a comma. It looks odd, but still. (In any case, a full stop, followed by closing quotes and a question mark is wrong.) It seems obvious to place the question mark outside the quotes.

As for the singular/plural issue, I think the fact that a team is a singular subject makes it possible to say "The Heat is coached by Pat Riley." The underlying notion is singular, "a team". You can't say "The police is here." because "the police" does not refer to a singular entity. But you can say, "The Police is here," when referring to the band The Police (at least, I think you can). Again, underlying notion is that of a single entity, "a band".

I hate to mention it, but you broke your own punctuation rule several times in the second paragraph. Anyway, I follow "logical quoting" rules (reference):

Quote:

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(1)' dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete *two* lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting.