Quote:
Originally Posted by MacEachaidh
Unfortunately, there are different rules (again!) between OZ punctuation and grammar and US English (for instance, in US English they include items like commas, full stops and semicolons within the quotation marks [a.k.a. inverted commas!] on items that aren't direct speech; in OZ and UK English we don't.
The response you got highlights the procedural part of the problem: it's difficult to do things other than "the American way" when the response if you do doesn't say "that's not how we do it", but leapfrogs past any awareness of valid differences and goes straight to "this is wrong" or "terrible" and ends up at "something we can't publish".
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Yes, this is pretty much how it goes. I've noticed posters here on MobileRead saying things like I come from GA or PA. I do understand what they mean, but the assumption that everyone, everywhere in the world, understands all the abbreviations for the various US states simply shows a lack of knowledge about the wider world. I'm not going to write Qld or NT without even mentioning the fact that I'm from Australia and expect to be understood.
On the question of inverted commas, I've been taught that punctuation does go inside direct speech, though if it isn't direct speech, it depends on how many words are in the inverted commas. A single word, such as "trashy", would have the punctuation outside the inverted commas.