Full stop
The traditional convention in American English is for full stops to be included inside the quotation marks, even if they are not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style shows clearly whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted phrase. The American rule is derived from typesetting while the British rule is grammatical (see below for more explanation). Although the terms American style and British style are used it is not as clear cut as that because at least one major British newspaper prefers typesetters' quotation (punctuation inside) and BBC News uses both styles, while scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision.
As with many such differences, the American rule follows an older British standard. The typesetter’s rule was standard in early 19th century Britain; the grammatical rule was advocated by the extremely influential book The King’s English, by Fowler and Fowler.
- “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)
- “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)
In British style, both single and double quotation marks are possible, but more modern style guides like the BBC’s tend to prefer the latter.[3]
Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with full stops and commas was not given much consideration. The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and full stop be protected behind the more robust quotation marks.[4] The U.S. style still adheres to this older tradition in formal writing but usually not in everyday use. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted text within the quotation marks. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quotation:
- Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.
- The URL starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.
References: Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition; Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford.
[
Spacing after full stop
- See: Double spacing, which includes a full history of spacing rules, a review of readability vs design implications, and a summary of current style guides.
- Alternatively, see that article's Style Preferences subsection for current practice.
There are three main conventions relating to the number of spaces used to separate sentences within the same paragraph:
- one widened space, typically two to three times wider than an inter-word space (traditional typography)
- two spaces (English Spacing or American Typewriter Spacing)
- one space (French Spacing)
Note that the term double spacing can also refer to a style of leading: the insertion of a full additional empty line between lines of text. This is commonly used for text which may incorporate later markup or modifications, such as proof-readers' copies or legal documents.
[
Asian full stop
In some Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。" (U+3002 "Ideographic Full Stop"). Unlike the Western full stop, this is often used to separate consecutive sentences, rather than to finish every sentence; it is frequently left out where a sentence stands alone, or where text is terminated by a quotation mark instead.
In the Devanagari script used to write Hindi, Sanskrit and some other Indian languages a vertical line (“।”) (U+0964 “Devanagari Danda”) is used to mark the end of a sentence. In Hindi it is known as poorna viraam (full stop). Some Indian languages also use the full-stop such as Marathi.
In Thai, no symbol corresponding to full stop is used. A sentence is basically written without a space and a space is used to mark the end of sentence.
[
Computing use
In computing, the full stop is often used as a delimiter commonly called a "dot", for example in DNS lookups and file names. For example:
- www.example.com
- document.doc
- 192.168.0.1
In computer programming, the full stop corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E. It is used in many programming languages as an important part of the syntax. C uses it as a means of accessing a member of a struct, and this syntax was inherited by C++ as a means of accessing a member of a class or object. Java and Python also follow this convention.
In file systems, the full stop is commonly used to separate the extension of a file name from the name of the file. RISC OS uses full stops to separate levels of the hierarchical file system when writing path names - similar to / in Unix-based systems and \ in MS-DOS-based systems.
In Unices, files or directories which start with a "." are hidden.
In Unix-like systems, the dot character represents the working directory. Two dots (..) represent the parent directory of the working directory.
Bourne-derived shells, such as sh, ksh, and Bash, also use the dot as a synonym for the source command, which reads the contents of a file and executes them.
[
See also
[
Notes
- ^ Julian Borger in The Guardian, February 3, 2006
- ^ Oxford A–Z of Grammar and Punctuation by John Seely.
- ^ BBC Writing Style Guidelines p. 17
- ^ AUE: FAQ excerpt: ", vs ,"
[
External links
- Chicago Style Q&A on one space versus two after sentences
- The Double-Space Debate A discussion on Blogdorf about one space versus two after sentences
- FontSite typographic design center on one space versus two after sentences
For more information review our copyright contact and privacy policy.