Gospel of Marks
Commas are the Rodney Dangerfield of punctuation: They get no respect. Also, they’re fat and dead.
Periods too. American English thinks they’re less important than the other line-enders: question marks, exclamation points, colons and semicolons. And nothing exposes American English’s bald-faced prejudice like a good ol’ quotation mark.
End a quotation with a comma or a period, and it goes inside the quotation. (“This is correct.” “This isn’t”.) But those marks that some claim are “more important”? Outside the quotation marks. Why the difference?
Outside the quotation marks makes sense, of course. You don’t want to pretend that whatever you’re quoting is exclaiming or questioning when in fact it’s not.
But why don’t commas and periods get the same respect? They’re working just as hard. Sure, they may not be provoking a reaction or prompting a response—sexier jobs, without a doubt—but where would you be without them? Stuck in one pauseless, senseless, never-ending sentence. I’ve seen it. You don’t want to go there. Trust me.
Even Lynne Truss maligned the period (which she, in her Britishness, endearingly calls a “full stop”) in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, calling it “the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly).” She contrasts it with the apostrophe, “the frantically multitasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort.”
And we all saw what happened to Lynne Truss: She wrote her second book not about grammar but about manners—and nobody read it. So there.
Despite her grammatical sexism, Truss, being a Brit, does get one thing right: The Brits put all punctuation—commas and periods included—outside quotation marks. It’s a much fairer delineation. We Americans could learn a thing or two from them.
British humor is too dry for Rodney Dangerfield anyway.
Which of the following is the proper form: “The car needs washing” or “The car needs to be washed”?
Both are correct. Go nuts.
Subscribe free to the Angry Grammarian podcast at www.theangrygrammarian.com.