Please check my grammar

Re: Re: Re: Please check my grammar

I think that's the heart of the matter.

Spelling, punctuation and word definitions are matters of social usage, not of codes and legislation. They describe what people generally do, how they use their words and craft their sentences. (Or they describe what some educational/economic elite does, at any rate.) I'm not sure if there's any objective right or wrong to this stuff.

Apart from France, where some national 'academie' apparently dictates such things, people are basically free to use their language as they please. The editors of the MLA Handbook aren't gonna kick in your door if you put a comma in the "wrong" place. Even in France, I don't think that people are going to be arrested and jailed for using French 'improperly'.

I guess that if you are writing in order to please people who are overly anal (like some English teachers), then you have gotta be anal too. Like most matters of social usage, it's all about conforming and fitting in.

But in 99% of life, it doesn't really matter a whole lot if you conform to every style-manual "rule", just so long as you can approximate the style of educated and professional writing sufficiently closely to be accepted by educated professionals. The goal is to avoid looking uneducated or lower class.

In fact, you often find the better writers intentionally breaking rules at their own discretion, if it makes their text read more smoothly and look better. Most English professors acknowledge that, but they point out that you usually have to have a pretty good feeling for the conventions before you can think about effectively breaking them.

Ultimately, these are simply matters of style.

 

Re: Re: Please check my grammar

 

Ah, yes... the old "so, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" gambit.

Tell me that's not the best you can do, here. Please.

The thread-starter was clear and unambiguous about it being a poem. With poems, nearly all bets are off. I'd have left out the qualifier "nearly" were it not for the fact that the poet needs to at least follow enough rules of English that his/her art does not get in the way of being understood at all...

...although, tell that to James Joyce.

Your question is at least complete. We have enough information to declare that one should do neither; one should stop.

The thread-starter's post was nowhere near that complete. We didn't know what came before, or after. We had insufficient data to figure out the logic of what punctuation should or should not be present; so we shouldn't even try. That, plus the fact that the thread-starter asked a very specific thing that s/he had, positively, given us sufficient information to determine, left us with one, very narrow question to answer...

...and answer it, I did. And correctly.

Do you just not like losing? Is that the problem, here?

 

Section 5.59 of my old 12th edition of the Chicago Style Manual says, "If the quotation is used as the subject or the predicate nominative of the sentence, however, or if it is a restrictive appositive, it should not be set off by commas."

Examples follow:

"Less is more" was that architect's watchword.
That architect's watchword was "Less is more."
The watchword "Less is more" aroused considerable controversy.

 

Again the discussion strays from answering the thread-starter's question to arguing whether a comma belongs at all. It's a perfectly fine thing to argue about I suppose; and while I'm not saying that that's an argument that shouldn't or can't happen here; or that you're not free to argue it with those here who've incorrectly tried to make that the subject of the thread, the bottom line is: If a comma is present -- whether rightly or wrongly -- it belongs inside the quotation marks, regardless of sentence logic, by US standards; and outside of them (unless the logic of the sentence requires that it be inside of them) by UK standards. Whether a comma should be there in the first place is another matter altogether... and one having nothing to do with the thread-starter's thread-starting question.

(Oy. The thread that just won't die.)

 

Not arguing, just stating a fact. Granted, a fact I thought the original poster might find useful.

(I apologize for my inept previous post quoting Gregg DesElm's message without reply. It was not an attempt to prolong the life of the thread by any means possible, though it must have seemed so.)

Bill
Bill