Warning to readers uninterested in punctuation matters: Don’t read further.

My post on proper punctuation of possessive singulars has led Matt Franck to advise me on another punctuation matter. Matt has passed along to me, privately and gently, that the long-accepted American convention is to place periods and commas inside the quotation marks. I’ve replied to Matt that I’m well aware of that convention and have deliberately decided not to follow it. As faithful readers of Bench Memos may have wondered about my admittedly unorthodox practice of (usually) placing periods and commas outside the quotation marks, let me explain why I have departed from the convention and what my practice is.

I regard the American convention on quotation punctuation as seriously defective for at least two reasons. First, putting something in quotes seems to tell the reader that what is in quotes is what is actually in the original. But when the closing period or comma is not in the original, placing it in quotes strikes me as a false statement. To be sure, the fact that the accepted convention calls for that false statement excuses the offense. But it still strikes me as a minor offense.

There are, of course, other social conventions that also call for false statements. When I greet a colleague with “Good morning! How are you?”, I’m not expecting in response the colleague’s candid statement of his well-being. But that social convention has the obvious upside of facilitating pleasantries. I don’t see any upside in the convention of including periods and commas inside the quotation marks. All that convention achieves is possible confusion over whether that punctuation exists in the original source.

Second, there are times when the convention causes goofy results. Consider, for example, this unremarkable proposition (variants of which pervade judicial opinions):

The question in this case is the precise meaning of the statutory term “person.”

But “person.” (with the period inside the quotes) is not the statutory term; “person” is. A convention that invites such imprecision is a flawed convention.

Because of my dissatisfaction with the convention, I have, as an experiment, employed over the last few years on Bench Memos (and on NRO generally) the unconventional practice of including within the quotation marks only what is in the actual source. (Sometimes that will include the closing punctuation from the source.) That practice has an obvious downside that I have risked: readers may find the unusual practice off-putting and may take it as a sign that I am ignorant (rather than defiant) of an elementary punctuation convention. I’ll note that I preemptively abandon that practice, and apply the convention, when I am writing for other publications whose editors would override me anyway. (I often try, though, to write around the problem.)