A Little Comma Drama
How Confident Are You in Your Grammar Knowledge?
Quick question: In U.S. English, should a comma be inside or outside quotation marks?
Two years ago, I would have answered without missing a beat, “Inside. Definitely.” After proofreading and editing for newspapers for more than 20 years, I believed my knowledge of U.S. grammar to be rock solid.
Today, though, I googled it.
Doubt can spread like a wildfire; for me, a career change was the spark and the internet the accelerant.
I took a job as a technical writer for a private company a little over a year ago. Within the first few weeks, I noticed a comma outside the quote marks of a document I was updating.
“Well, that’s odd,” I thought. I chalked it up to a typo, moved the comma, and continued revising the text. I found an errant comma or two in document after document over the next year. It did not take long to shift from thinking it was a typo to realizing the person who created the document believed it to be grammatically correct.
And that is when my doubt started. That person, my predecessor, had been confident in his placement of those commas…as confident as I had been in where I moved them.