Much Ado about NOTHING

I can't make up my mind. Or I can. Or maybe not.

At work, we use logical punctuation. What is that, you may well ask. That is when you put the comma or period outside of the quotation marks, instead of inside them. The latter is the traditional American method, and like many American things, it's utterly illogical. (This is a country that still hasn't adopted the metric system and still expects people to pay for their health care.) Except when you're quoting something that actually contains the punctuation within the quote, there's no reason to put the comma or period inside.

Now you might be thinking of a word like "pedantic", he wrote. That's logical (the punctuation, I mean).

In most professionally edited American publications, you would see that sentence punctuated like so:

Now you might be thinking of a word like "pedantic," he wrote.

We Americans are gradually adopting the logical style, especially on the web, and it's only a matter of time, I think, before we're conquered by the British.

That's because the "logical" way to punctuate is also the standard British way, and as far as I'm concerned, the Brits are right. They invented the language, after all. The problem is that I was raised with American punctuation, and I find it hard to give it up, especially here. You may have noticed that sometimes I'm logical, and sometimes I'm not. So sue me, Mr. Spock.

I guess you could say the style here is ambiguous punctuation.

There's a sweet little article about all this, which includes Conan O'Brien's opinion on the subject, here.