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Old 08-16-2010, 09:30 AM   #7
MacEachaidh
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G'day ghostyjack,
Here's what The Oxford Manual of Style from Oxford University Press has to say:

Quote:
All internal punctuation within an italic phrase, sentence, or longer extract is set in italic, including colons between titles and subtitles, and exclamation or question marks that form part of the quoted matter.

Punctuation not belonging to the italic matter is not set in italic, including opening and closing quotation marks that precede or follow italics, and commas or semicolons that separate italicised words or phrases.
OK, that's the British position. (And Australian, incidentally. I know you didn't ask about us, but I thought I'd throw it in there anyway. The AGPS Style Manual essentially agrees with the Oxford mob.)

So, what about the US?

It's an interesting situation. The Chicago Manual of Style used to say this:

Quote:
Generally, punctuation marks are printed in the same style or font of type as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them.
So, by that rule "What are you saying?!" might be given emphatic stress like this:

Quote:
"What are you saying?!"
The question mark and exclamation mark would be italicised (which I think makes sense), but so would the closing set of inverted commas (which is what I was referring to in my earlier post when I said it looked scrappy).

Ahh, but it doesn't rest there. In the most recent (15th) edition of the Chicago Manual, it says:

Quote:
All punctuation marks should appear in the same font -- roman or italic -- as the main or surrounding text, except for punctuation that belongs to a title or an exclamation in a different font. This departure from Chicago's [sic] former usage serves both simplicity and logic. For an alternative system, see 6.5.
That's section 6.3. In the referred section 6.5, it says

Quote:
According to a more traditional system, periods, commas, colons, and semicolons should appear in the same font as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them if different from that of the main or surrounding text. In the first example in 6.3, the first two commas and the semicolon would be italic. Question marks and exclamation points, however, should appear in the same font as the immediately preceding word only if they belong to a title or an exclamation (see examples in 6.3).

So unfortunately, ghostyjack, there's not consensus, but if you go by the latest issue of the Chicago manual, and ignore section 6.5, it's close.

Myself, I tend to use the system that makes sense to me (in my case, the Oxford approach), and leave it to others to cope with it varying from what they expected. Otherwise, you'll be perpetually second-guessing yourself and turning yourself inside out, and you're still always going to be "wrong" with somebody.

Last edited by MacEachaidh; 08-16-2010 at 09:33 AM.
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