By and large, I conform well to American business writing grammatical standards. There is one way, however, in which I simply prefer to be wrong: the placement of commas and periods in relation to non-conversational quotes. If the punctuation is not part of the phrase, I prefer to put it outside the quotation marks instead of (correctly) inside.

As I discovered earlier this week in conversation with some fellow MIT alums, this is a classic geek preference. According to http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html,

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don’t belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”.

Standard usage would make this

Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.”

but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!

This was a revelation for me, because my preference for the error is directly related to exactly these two things. Perhaps it simply seems less precise to me to include punctuation in phrases where it did not originally exist. For whatever reason, unless I am writing for publication, I put my commas and periods outside. Well, I do so until the grammar-check inside my application corrects them…

I’ve been considering adding a new feature to this blog in addition to my leading geek posts: The Grammar Geek. I’ll post about my pet peeves. If my readers hate this, I’ll make it go away.

Very little in this world drives me as crazy as making plurals with apostrophes (in second place is probably NOT using apostrophes where they’re necessary). Here’s the general rule for apostrophes:

Apostrophes are used when letters are dropped or (rarely) for typographical reasons. There are three cases:

1. Possessive nouns (this is historical–possessives were once formed by adding -es to the ends of nouns. When the “e” stopped being pronounced, the dropped “e” was replaced by the apostrophe, making the plural -‘s. Offhand, I don’t quite know what’s up with the possessive of plural nouns, but I think it has to do with the French (no, really, see here).)
2. Contractions
3. Plurals of lower case letters (“mind your p’s and q’s” (amusingly, blogger spell check wants me to change this to Ps and Qs. Note that there is no apostrophe for upper case letters–this means acronyms! (more amusingly, Firefox spell check wants me to change those to P’s and Q’s–which is wrong!!)))

Please note that, except for the third case (which has exactly twenty-six uses), NEVER MAKE A PLURAL WITH AN APOSTROPHE. Ahem. Making a plural with an apostrophe has become so common that I think I’ve developed a permanent twitch.

I’m going to give an example with the word that I see most often violated: attorney.

• attorneys = more than one attorney
• attorney’s = belonging to one attorney
• attorneys’ = belonging to more than one attorney

Got it? Good. Now you can twitch, too.