In the UK, dialogue is often written with inverted commas or single quote marks, with punctuation outside the marks such as:
'Hey! Give me back my pint before I throw you down the "apples and pears" you good for nothing goit'!
You see, the system is inverted from the American system, or vice versa depending on your locale.
I don't know why, really... I figure it's the same reason we Americans say ZEE instead of ZED and dumped the superfluous L's and swapped the S's for Z's, and of course, drive on the right side of the road: spite. Anyway...
When I'm submitting a manuscript, would it be okay to submit based upon American punctuation style or should I laboriously tweak my manuscripts to the UK standard? Would it matter? Do I need two separate manuscripts -- one for the UK and another for the US?
Anyone have a clue?
If anyone can definitively answer why the systems are different, that would be cool, too. Interestingly, my English wife says she was always taught to use double quotes for dialogue. Yet, reading any UK published book, such as Harry Potter, I see single quotes. My wife is stumped like I am...
Cheers,
HSO
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited July 20, 2004).]
I wonder if you couldn't just enquire of the publisher if they have a preference for formatting style. I read Oxford Classics and most of them have the quote reversal you mentioned, but it doesn't change my comprehgension of the text. If you're just submitting a query it might not matter. Once they accept the manuscript the style would probably be more important.
However these are just my ramblings and are not based on any actual experience with publishing in the UK
I have never encountered the end punctuation outside of the speech marks before though. Maybe it was just a printing error.
On a diff. note, next time you're coming to London, let me know... We can point you to several nice restaurants 'n' stuff.
Gwalchmai: Sorry, that was my error -- I had rewritten the sentence twice and messed it up. But, punctuation often does fall outside of quotes and parentheses in certain situations.
Robyn: That's a good idea... I'll start investigating UK publishers and get it straight from the horse's mouth. I'm becoming more and more distrustful of web-based advice sites because I've been mislead substantially by those who have no idea what they're talking about [not referring to this Forum or even this site -- I mean other web sites]. There is quite a bit of misinformation floating around out there.
Anyway, I was hoping to circumvent the necessity for doing the research myself by asking here...
Thanks anyway.
There is no standard on single/double quotation marks, as far as I can tell. I've been told that educational publishers _always_ use double, and every school teacher I've heard of teaches using doubles, but outside of schools the standard seems to be singles.
The Oxford Manual of Style is fairly definitive in matters like this, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg (I got my copy from TSP, www.etsp.co.uk who are a fairly good non-fiction book club).