Writer, Editor, Helper

“Logical Punctuation” and Quotation Marks: In Defense of CMOS

I must admit I was taken aback by David Marsh’s blog post last week at Mind Your Language. In “‘The British Style’? ‘The American Way?’ They Are Not So Different,” he explains that British style for punctuating quotations is not as “logical” as popularly thought.

Am I the only one who didn’t know that not all Brits even agree on this matter? That Radio Times style is not necessarily Guardian or Economist or Telegraph style? True, in all of them a period or comma may follow an end quote (not allowed in American style). But I’ve always thought (not proud of this) that the only determining factor was whether the punctuation was part of the original quotation.

Not so. Turns out it also matters whether the original statement was grammatically complete—an issue often ignored or misstated. Marsh points out the difficulties in identifying for sure what exactly constitutes grammatical completeness, and after some head scratching, he concludes that contrary to portrayals of the British system as “logical,” in fact “there is nothing very logical about it.”

Marsh was responding to confusion he had noticed online, mentioning in particular a recent Slate post by Ben Yagoda, who promotes a simpler method of “logical punctuation” whereby commas and periods fall outside the quotation marks regardless of syntax or original punctuation. (Since Yagoda calls this “the British way,” I’m guessing he missed the same memo I did.)

Yagoda thinks “logical punctuation” will prevail. Perhaps hoping to whip up some controversy, he e-mailed Chicago to ask whether The Chicago Manual of Style would consider adopting it for online prose.

Our e-mailed reply:

As you know, we’re pretty slow to jump in with endorsements or prohibitions when it comes to writing and editing fashions. We have the luxury of several years’ reflection between editions, and we don’t update our guidelines in the meantime. Our practice of having identical styling in print and online seems to work fine for us. Having just launched the 16th edition, we won’t be changing anything soon in CMOS.

That said, we already recommend flexibility in styling for the sake of one’s readers. We publish books by Canadian and British authors, and in each case the manuscript editor decides whether to Americanize the punctuation and spelling or leave them as they are. If an online article or website is likely to be read internationally, that might be reason enough to adopt British-style punctuation. So it’s not like we would throw up our hands in horror. Naturally, we recommend consistency.

Yagoda was what you might call “snowclowning”* when he reported our reply as “in essence: ‘How about never? Is never good for you?’” But CMOS got feedback from all directions on it. I don’t know which was more annoying, the flak for our “rigidity” or the high-fiving from kneejerk sticklers.

So this time let me speak for myself: Who wants a style you have to puzzle over or research every time you come to a quotation? Chicago’s styling and Yagoda’s “logical” method are both efficient in their simplicity. In or out: either way, everything will probably work out just fine.

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* Please don’t write to tell me I misspelled it. It’s a pun. I’m sorry.

Subversive Tech Tip #20, Part 2: Solutions

Last week, I asked how you would locate quotations within quotations in a Word document in order to style the inner quotes with single quotation marks.

Your answers ranged from nonstarting to overthought to brilliant!

Some of the answers worked fine for locating all of the hundreds of quotations, but since I wanted to locate only the twenty or so inner quotations, those solutions weren’t practicable. Macros for automatic replacements were likewise out of the question, since I was making corrections on paper proofs.

Kathleen McLaughlin gave the most clear-headed answer, the one I actually used: go to the original, unedited file and search for the opening double quotation marks. (In the original file, which featured British-style punctuation, these appeared only for inner quotations. Outer quotations had single quotation marks.) Mark the corrections on the proofs. Simple, fast.

Molly Hinshaw succeeded in solving the word-processing challenge (which did not indicate the availability of the original file) in a way that is both efficient and thorough.

Molly reasoned that on the proofs, quotations within quotations would look like the following (in other words, there were double quotation marks for every quotation, even where single quotation marks were needed). I'll bold them in red, for emphasis:

“Son of Atreus: now, my lord, the Achaians are trying
to make a speech even longer than mine and fillèd with more blather
[many lines of blather]
and Kalchas spoke straightway a quote within a thundering quote:
“Zeus of the counsels has shown us this great portent, a new sign:
that in the tenth year we shall end this honking great speech.”
[end of inner speech; many more lines of outer speech]
So he spoke to us then, all you warriors nodding from boredom.
But come, you glazed-eyed Achaians, let every man stay
here, until we have spoken as long as the bard of Priam.”

What marks such passages as awry is that opening quotation marks appear two in a row, with no closed quotation mark between them. This suggests how to locate the inner quotations in one simple step:

In the MS Word file, use a wildcard search to locate all text that lies between two open quotation marks. (To do this, open the Find and Replace box. Click the checkbox beside “Use wildcards.” Type \“*\“ into the Find box.) The result will look like this:

“Son of Atreus: now, my lord, the Achaians are trying
to make a speech even longer than mine and fillèd with more blather
[many lines of blather]
and Kalchas spoke straightway a quote within a thundering quote:
“Zeus of the counsels has shown us this great portent, a new sign:
that in the tenth year we shall end this honking great speech.”
[end of inner speech; many more lines of outer speech]
So he spoke to us then, all you warriors nodding from boredom.
But come, you glazed-eyed Achaians, let every man stay
here, until we have spoken as long as the bard of Priam.”

At the end of the highlighting, you can see the opening quotation mark for the inner quote.

In this way, it took only about ten minutes to locate every inner quotation in the Word file and check the corresponding page on the proofs to confirm that the proofreader had marked every instance. (She had.)

Kathleen and Molly, well done! And thank you to everyone who gave this thought and offered suggestions. In future, I would love to post more challenges. Feel free to suggest one on my Questions page.

 

Subversive Tech Tip #20, Part 1: Take the Challenge!

Photo by James Lumb

Looking over the work of a proofreader the other day, I saw that she had marked a place where the quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation were incorrect. Single quotation marks were needed for the inner quote, but double quotation marks appeared. This was my fault; I had run a global search-and-replace to change British punctuation (single quotation marks) to American (double), and I had forgotten about the quotes within quotes. In the original version, outer quotations were in single quotes, and inner quotations were in double quotes. Now, thanks to me, all were double.

I was aghast. There were a lot of them. And the MS was huge. And it was important. Okay—it was the Iliad. With a print run in the tens of thousands of copies. And I was the one who had insisted on changing the punctuation. (Why hadn’t I let well enough alone? Well, because we’re an American publisher. And Richmond Lattimore was an American, for pity’s sake. And this was our first update in sixty years. And I wanted to . . . contribute.)

The proofreader seemed to have done an excellent job, but what if she had missed some? Some of the outer quotations were pages long, and the inner ones could be lengthy as well—it would be easy to lose track of which was which. How the heck was I going to check this without reading the entire poem?

Assume that this is your problem. You have the MS Word document you sent to the typesetter (a single file). How would you locate the inner quotations?

I’ll tell you next week what I did. I’m not confident that it was the most efficient solution, but it took only a few minutes (not counting the hour I spent working on something else and thinking about it before I figured it out). Feel free to share your ideas below. I’m hoping we’ll all learn something.

Dear Carol: Critiquing One’s Colleagues and Stalking a Good Copyeditor

Dear Carol:

I am sometimes asked to mentor corporate communicators new to the field. I find this relatively easy and fun, until it comes to copyediting. I have been asked to edit pieces seriously off the mark: no point, no alignment with corporate objectives, rambling, no logic flow, redundant, no call to action. I am stumped on how to provide big-picture and detailed feedback that is both useful and motivating. I simply don’t know how to begin. . . . I’m paralyzed. I think part of my dilemma is that my own writing skills are instinctive. I have never been a writing instructor. Do you have advice for me? I want to be a caring, helpful mentor.

Heidi

Dear Heidi:

You are obviously already caring, but you don’t yet feel competent criticizing the writing of colleagues. To organize your thoughts, create a list of writing issues like the ones you mentioned: vague objectives, lack of logic, rambling, repetition, and any others that you have identified so far. Give a copy to the writer up front and explain that these are areas that sometimes trouble corporate writers and that you’ll be looking at her work with those issues in mind. Do that, and keep notes. The checklist will help you organize your editing and your feedback. In your critique, if the writer has done well in some areas, you’ll be able to mention it. Any writer with initiative will begin to examine her own work for the kinds of trouble you point out.

Second, to gain more confidence as a writing coach it might help to take a class in negotiation or writing or copyediting and make a point of observing the teacher. And take a look at Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications (especially the sections on editorial triage and querying). You’ll enjoy it and learn something useful.

Carol

Dear Carol,

Where are all the good copy editors hiding? A colleague recently asked me where she could find someone to edit her dissertation, and I didn’t have a clue where to point her. Another acquaintance is hoping to expand her editorial staff, but has had trouble finding good candidates. Are there professional societies or clearinghouses or the like out there? Or perhaps someone to lead a safari to hunt down the rare and elusive style expert? Your wisdom on the matter would be appreciated!

Valerie

Dear Valerie,

Professional freelancers get most of their business by word of mouth, so it makes sense to ask around. Your grad student colleague should ask new PhDs or faculty at her university for recommendations, and your hiring manager friend can ask current employees to spread the word that she’s looking—almost every good editor knows another good editor. Finally, the Editorial Freelancers Association website features a directory of freelance writers, editors, proofreaders, and indexers. Members write their own listings, so it is up to the hirer to check recommendations and judge whether qualifications and experience are apt.

Carol
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Readers: Write to me at my Questions and Suggestions page!