[ SECRET POST #2706 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2706 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 079 secrets from Secret Submission Post #387.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm coming across more and more fics that put punctuation OUTSIDE the quotation marks.

Like so:

"Did you know that the sky is blue"? John asked.

[misty_anon]

Me too. Lots of people seem to have no idea how to punctuate dialogue. :(

Also, some people seem to think that's the British way of punctuating dialogue. I've seen that offered as an excuse a ton of times. It's not true; we punctuate quotes differently, but we punctuate dialogue or direct speech the same way the US does.

[(Anonymous)]

To be fair, dialogue punctuation rules are weird as hell. I spent a week studying them when I started posting longer fics and still have to go back and review on occasion (and I teach ESL for a living!)

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I'm honestly astounded by this comment. I can't remember ever having to learn dialogue punctuation rules. I read a lot and picked them up by osmosis; nothing difficult about it. I always figured that people who couldn't punctuate dialogue just didn't give a shit, but you obviously do care and still find it confusing. My mind is currently blown.

(Good on you for making the effort, though! I wish more writers followed your example.)

[feotakahari]

I'm editing for a Swedish writer, so I have to look up dialogue rules in order to tell him what the rules are. I've repeatedly discovered that I'm breaking a rule, and I typically do so because the writers I learned from break it as well. (Case in point: http://mythicscribes.com/forums/writing-questions/11176-ellipses-dialogue-capitalization.html )

AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. It baffles me to this day. I'm sure I don't manage to use all the rules properly, but I do my best.

(My biggest fear is that I'm dumping mediocre fic into the aether. If it's bad, whatever. People will notice right away and stop reading. If it's good, all the yays! However, I fear I may be one of those authors for which the writing is worth the slog, but the slog makes it much less satisfying.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think dialogue punctuation rules in English are pretty easy to remember, tho, specially compared to dialogue punctuation rules in Spanish.

[inevitableentresol]

What? They think that's the British way?

Absolutely not.

British paper books do often use single quotation marks for dialogue/direct speech instead of double quotation marks, but otherwise it's the same. Online the UK standard is for double quotation marks, same as the US.

[misty_anon]

I've heard (read - it was online) people say that British people leave the punctuation outside the speechmarks in dialogue, so anyone doing that is punctuating it the British way. ::facepalm::

[inevitableentresol]

That's bizarre. All they have to do is read one page of the BBC website to find that we punctuate dialogue just the same.

So they're saying this online, when the correct information is literally one webpage away. So odd.

[(Anonymous)]

Smells of 'pretentious' and 'lazy'. It's not even as if Brits and British publications are so hard to find for actual confirmation.

[diet_poison]

/cringe

[brandiweed.livejournal.com]

I think it's a mutation from the USENET and ASCII-only email days when you wanted to give an instruction-- included punctuation would result in a syntax error or other undesirable result.

In an HTML world, though, you can use italics or bold to set off the command.

[quantumreality]

One convention I still hold onto from those days is that I won't change a period to a comma next to an end quote if it has to be part of a literal statement or a command issued to a computer.

[(Anonymous)]

There is a time and place (and grammatical rule) for putting a question mark after the quotation marks, but this is SO not it.

(The only time I know of doing it that way is when you're asking a question with a quote in it and the quote is not a question. For example, Did Susan say, "I have three cats and three dogs"?)