Quotational nightmare

As an editor, I deal with a lot of grammar use – proper, improper and otherwise. I am not claiming to be a subject matter expert, but I’ve been doing this long enough to pick up on a thing or two. Among the many infractions I often see, the most common usually involves the use of quotation marks.

It’s simple, really, people. If you are writing American English, the punctuation ALWAYS goes inside the quote. Always.

British English is different. In fact, their rules concerning quotes are just about the reverse of ours. I understand that the innarnetwebs is an increasingly small place, globally, and I’ve witnessed plenty of great grammatical use out there. But the quote thing drives me crazy. For some reason, people have begun to use the quote mark inside the punctuation if the material being quoted is a title or some euphemistic phrase. If you’re writing from the good ol’ U.S. of A., that is incorrect.

Quoting from the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Usage (Garner, 1998):

With a closing quotation mark, practices vary. In AmE, it is usual to place a period or comma within the closing quotation mark, whether or not the punctuation so placed is actually a part of the quoted matter. In BrE, by contrast, the closing quotation mark comes before any punctuation marks, unless these marks form a part of the quotation itself (or what is quoted is less than a full sentence in its own right). Thus:
AmE: (1) “Joan pointedly said, ‘We won’t sing “God Save the Queen.”’”
(2) “She looked back on her school years as being ‘unmitigated misery.’”
BrE: (1) ‘Joan pointedly said, “We won’t sing ‘God Save the Queen’.”’
(2) ‘She looked back on her school years as being “unmitigated misery”.’

I hope that clears things up a little bit. Now I can climb down from by pedantic soapbox.