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My Brief but Spectacular Career As a Punctuation Enforcer
Can clear rules interfere with a broader understanding?
“Periods are fragile. They want to nestle inside quotation marks. It’s a matter of safety. Otherwise . . . who knows what could happen? One might be kidnapped by a parenthesis or sliced in pieces by that sharp greater-than symbol. You see? It’s the same for a question mark. You need to care for your sentence closures. Keep them inside those quotes.”
That was me-as-writing-teacher trying to make punctuation simple. This one rule was always a challenge for my students and I thought a little humor might help them remember to put their doggone periods inside their quotation marks.
I enjoyed the clarity of the rule; the confidence it gave me. I felt like I knew what I was doing. I even enjoyed circling those errant periods. In green, not red. I’m not an ogre!
But hey, punctuation goes inside the quotes. Everyone agrees.
Don’t they?
The Take-Down
Decades into my teaching career, I moved to New Zealand to teach and I took my hard and fast rule with me. For years, I cheerfully circled those bits of stray punctuation with my trusty green pen. My students made the corrections and their revised papers…
