Monday, June 18, 2012

I'm warming up to the standard punctuation form of the period being enclosed within a direct quote, as in:

"This is what he said."

 ... as opposed to

"This is what he said".

For many years I opted for the latter simply because it made more syntactical sense, coming from a computer programming background. I now understand that, if one is to quote someone directly, the statement, as a whole, should be completely enclosed within the quotes.

Somewhere, E.B. White is giggling to himself and high-fiving some supernatural form of Strunk. But then "that's what they said.".