American and British punctuation

All international students, especially those who grew up in the Commonwealth or went to a Commonwealth-curriculum school, will know the pain of having to switch to the American system of spelling and punctuation. Many refuse to spell words the American way, out of practice or out of a desire to not conform; others change their ways, but inconsistently, with their deeply-ingrained old ways of spelling and writing never really going away, like that accent that always leaves behind its traces.

Of all the differences in writing punctuation, the only one that I truly dislike is the American habit of having the quotation mark in a phrase come at the end of a clause or sentence. Having grown up with the British system, where the logic of the context determines whether or not the punctuation belongs inside or outside the quotation, I've always found the American system misleading. Here's an article that points to the difference between American and British usage, and offers a historical* reason for why this is the case.

I'm certainly guilty of inconsistency, but I deem that to be less of a problem than being guilty of an illogical consistency. I will try henceforth to place my commas and periods where they logically belong, at least in writing where I'm not penalized for grammatical errors!





*Given the fact that English does not have a standard form or some sort of academy that decides upon global standards, the final yardstick for what is grammatical and what is not comes down to actual usage. This means that the greater the number of people who accept your version of the story, the more legitimate it becomes. "Correctness" and "wrongness" become a matter of social convention (which in turn is heavily influenced by history and received traditions).

This is as true for my one-man effort to reform American punctuation as it is for the use of the indefinite article "a" instead of "an" before the word "historical". Older books and articles often use "an" because they don't pronounce the 'h' in "historical". This is similar to, and possibly derived from, the French histoire, in which 'h' is silent. (Hence l'histoire and mon histoire, etc.) However, now that the 'h' does tend to get pronounced in "history" and "historical", and now that "an historical" sounds both wrong and pompous to me, it makes sense for me and for other modern English speakers to use "a" instead of "an" now. Languages change!