Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The UK and Ireland use single or double quotes for outer dialogue. Depends on publisher and era.
An en-dash only looks like a hyphen if you have a bad font. UK doesn't do spaces on em-dash, only en-dashes used like bracketing commas. Broken off speech on UK/Ireland is em-dash with no spaces. An ellipsis can have different functions. It can show elided content such as one side of a phone conversation (and space before and after is common), or can show a range instead of "to" or "-" and then no space is common. It can signify trailing off speech instead of a "period", and then often no space before, space after and then new sentence.
Publishers have style guides to cover the areas of punctuation that are not 100% definitive.
Many punctuation marks are multi-purpose, like a hyphen is a word-joiner or to split a word at the end of a line. The ’ is used for three purposes, or four if you count a Title different to dialogue, but not for feet or minutes, those use ′ (prime). Also nested quotation in dialogue uses the alternate quote system.
Typewriter single quote ' is almost always wrong and " always wrong, except in programming or CSV files etc.
What I hate is Gutenberg formatting UK or Irish books with entirely USA punctuation for dashes. I quite accept USA published/written books using the USA scheme.
But with ebooks and and editor you can have your own scheme.
|
So why is it that some books published in the UK use US punctuation? That makes things inconsistent in the UK (IMHO).