It's not "its", it's "IT'S"!
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- Snead
- JustBeachy
- Snead
- janluthman
- geolab
- biogardener
- Waxing_Frog
This archived discussion is "read only".
» JustBeachy - Punctuation Marks and Quotation Marks
Hi Snead,The periods and commas go inside the punctuation marks in American English (although in British English they go outside).
For exclamation points and question marks, it depends on the meaning you are conveying. For instance, if we took the sentence below ...
The college freshman had the nerve to say, "I'm not going to class tomorrow!"
With the exclamation point inside the quotations, we are saying that what is within the quotes is the exclamation. In other words, the college freshman made the statement in an exclamatory tone.
Now, in this version ...
The college freshman had the nerve to say, "I'm not going to class tomorrow"!
... the exclamation is on the speaker of the sentence. In other words, they are appalled that the college freshman made such a statement. So the sentence itself (not just the part in quotes) is made in an exclamatory tone.
The same rules apply with a question mark; its placement depends on whether the entire sentence is a question, or just the part in the quotes.
-- posted by JustBeachy
» janluthman - Re: Punctuation Marks and Quotation Marks
In response to message posted by JustBeachy:How about the possessive of a noun that ends in 's' or, even worse, double 's'?
eg The compass's needle
Someone suggested to me that the possessive 's' should be omitted, and just the apostrophe used. Is that correct?
-- posted by janluthman
» geolab - Re: Re: Punctuation Marks and Quotation Marks
In response to message posted by janluthman:
You are correct in omitting the extra 's'.
An example would be discussing an object of Mr Hays. Is that Mr Hays' book? Not - Is that Mr Hays's book. I have seen this mistake so often, even on the billboards of multinational companies.
Kind regards, Mark
-- posted by geolab
» biogardener - Advertising Posters
A little over 20 years ago, I spent a month traveling across the USA by Greyhound bus. Whenever I stopped over in a city, I relied on city buses for transport. They all had advertising poster over the windows, and I read every single one of them, far more than I could count. In that whole month, I did not come across one single poster which did not display at least one obvious grammatical error. Most of the errors were due to the homophone problem, i.e. they were of the type which a spell checker would not catch.English is not my mother tongue. I learned it in school in Germany, and I found the grammar far simpler than that of my mother tongue. It is hard for me to understand why Americans do not care enough about their written language to be able to use it correctively. Surely everyone learns how to use a dictionary in school.
I have now lived in Canada for half a century, and I have rarely found grammar errors in Canadian advertising. Can someone tell me why Canadians are more concerned about effective communication than Americans are?
I have a difficult time comprehending what I am reading when I have to weed through grammar problems. Many times, I have to reread a sentence several times, and by the time I am done, I don't remember what the author is talking about. Needless to say, I won't read any more of his writing unless I have to.
I am happy to see your topic here and hope that many people will learn from it.
-- posted by biogardener
» Waxing_Frog - Re: Re: Re: Punctuation Marks and Quotation Marks
In The Elements of Style, William Strunk recommends the singular possessive "apostrophe ess" ('s) after a surname that coincidentally ends in ess. Hence, “Mrs. Phillips drove Mr. Phillips's car,” but “I visited the Phillipses at the Phillipses' house.”This site,
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/posse...
...gives an excellent outline of some of the rules governing possessives, especially as they relate to pluralized names. And as so often happens in rules of grammar, sometimes it depends on the author and consistency, sometimes it depends on the “sound” of a word, and sometimes it depends on trying to be less awkward in construction. The only incontrovertible rule in grammar is, you can break any rule as long as you know the rules! ;-D
-- posted by Waxing_Frog
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