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Old 05-31-2014, 04:16 AM   #43
Jellby
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Quote:
Originally Posted by susan_cassidy View Post
Why do you think that the double-quote should be treated any differently than any other character? In other words, why are you wanting to indent the rest of the text? It would look perfectly fine to just let the lines fall where they naturally would.
It's a relatively common typesetting choice for poetry. As for the reasons, I can imagine that:

1. The quote doesn't really belong to the poetry. The quote belongs to the external text, and the whole poetry is inside the quote. This does not apply when the quote belongs to the poetry, as in You are old, Father William. In that case it would be wrong (in my opinion, at least) to "hang" the quotes.

2. It can be argued that it "looks nicer".
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