Published on September 5, 2025 1:57 PM GMT
I think I’m an excellent editor. Because I believe that I’m great at editing, I have a bunch of other feelings:
- I feel worse learning I failed an editing task than other sorts of tasksI feel confident when pitching my editing skills, and don’t get in my own wayI enter flow state easily when doing editingI presume I should absolutely, unequivocally, know the basics
This post is about that last one.
Case Study: “This situation”.
When quoting something inline,
as opposed to a block quote, like this,
punctuation gets tricky. Take the list above, and say I wanted to quote the last bullet point for some reason. I might format it (abridged) like “I presume… the basics”. It looks ugly, because the period is awkwardly standing around after the end of the quotation. It’d be more attractive to just type “I presume… the basics.” But technically that’s wrong, because the list I’m quoting didn’t have periods. Right?
It gets deeper than this, but the core problem remains the same:
- “You can quote part of a sentence that ends with the same kind of punctuation you want,” and face the decision of whether to include that punctuation within the quotation mark boundary.Or, “you can quote an entire sentence that in fact ended with a period”, and face the same decision, maybe in a document where elsewhere, you conspicuously had some enfolding-sentence punctuation inside the quotation marks.
And even if you just assiduously follow the decision procedure I’m gesturing toward, and put punctuation marks inside quotations when they existed in the source material, even if you’re structurally leveraging those punctuation marks for your original sentence in which they’re embedded, you have to contend with hypothetical purists who (I claim) would say it’s technically most correct to just never include punctuation in a quotation, unless you are actively quoting the author’s use of that punctuation, specifically.
Do you notice what I’m doing here? It’s subtle, and it’s not subtle. Part of me is desperately trying to show off that I’m a good editor, that I’m highly knowledgeable about this domain and flexing that knowledge via a bunch of nuance. But another part of me knows the truth. I’ll give that part the honor of a block quote.
This might just be a basic, easy, bread-and-butter rule, with objective prior art, where if I were a 19-year-old I’d just look it up and find Strunk and White settling the question once and for all. And if so, I don’t know that rule.
There’s a very easy way to find out if that’s true, if all my floundering and finagling and fretting is useless, and the question has a clear answer. I could - I should - just ask ChatGPT and Claude. If they agree with each other, they’re probably right. Then I’ll know. The only thing standing in my way is the feeling that I shouldn’t have to research this. That doing such a thing is so obviously for amateurs, and that surely, by now, I am no such thing.
Whatever. Let’s ask.
Oracle. “Fix my blind spot.”
The models reached consensus. To quote from Claude 4.1 Opus:
Opus Explanation
U.S. Style (Traditional)
Periods and commas: Always inside quotation marks, regardless of whether they're part of the originalQuestion marks and exclamation points: Inside if part of the quote, outside if part of your sentenceColons and semicolons: Always outside
Example: She said it was "perfect," but I disagreed.
British/Logical Style
All punctuation: Only inside if it's part of the original material being quotedThis is more precise and preserves the integrity of quotations
Example: She said it was "perfect", but I disagreed.
Suddenly, I understand why I felt so weird and confused about this. I learned to write in an American literary style. But over years, my editing has gravitated toward more technical stuff. So my aesthetic instincts tell me “do it like this,” but my recent habits complain that “it’s not quite logical”.
Still, now I know. In American and non-legalistic/non-technical writing, I can just make it look pretty and put commas and periods inside the quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation points go outside, unless they’re part of the sentence, and colons and semicolons always go outside. Cool. Never would have guessed that last part, no matter how much I inflated my “expertise” like a threatened pufferfish.
I am now a 0.2% better editor. Do you see what I had to do? Can you imagine how it probably hurt? But I can honestly report, on the other end, that it hurts no longer.
Is there anything similar you should do, to likewise grow a little bit, today?
Discuss
