a cry for help

Now playing: Amos and Andrew on TBS... samuel l jackson and nic cage... it's actually slightly funny. in a lame sort of way.

Okay, A brief note on punctuation. I may have already said this, but I'm going to say it again. Let me explain why. I work with self-publishing authors. Self publishing is a pretty ambiguous field. On the one hand, sometimes self published books do great and are great. Several really great authors started out by independently publishing their first book. On the other hand, sometimes self published books are horrible. That is just fact-of-matter. The same is true in the traditional publishing field. But in the traditional publishing field--usually--some editing is foisted upon every book. Thankfully, there are good companies in the independent publishing arena that are beginning to bring editorial quality to this arena, but that isn't at all my point...

My point is actually that I've gotten to work with quite the cross-section of people. I've worked with doctors and with people for whom English is a second language. And you know what? (Hahaha, I commited a sentence fragment as I tried to wax eloquent about editorial labour.) ...Know what? Everyone has at least one punctuation issue. Everyone. Seriously, I'm talking, like, 100%. My personal favourite is that sometimes I have a hard time remembering that you don't put a comma in a compound predicate. I hate that.

Right now, I want to address the issue of punctuation and quotation marks. I'm reading stuff, and people write:

So Luke said, "Hey buddy, I'll be in town next week".

or

So Luke said, "Hey buddy, I'll be in town next week", but I'm not going to be here.

The fact is, both of those sentences are wrong. Commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks. At least, in North America. And also, there might be an exception in writing on legal issues. But that's it. Any other time...any style: prose, poetry, whatever...any other genre: fiction, biography, whatever... Inside the quotation mark! So the preceding sentences should be:

So Luke said, "Hey buddy, I'll be in town next week."

and

So Luke said, "Hey buddy, I'll be in town next week," but I'm not going to be here.

When it comes to question marks and exclamation marks, it depends on whether the punctuation belongs to the quote or to your sentence. For example:

I called him dumb, and he yelled "I'm the smartest person ever!"

compared to

I was shocked to find out that there were "63 murders per 100,000 people in Columbia in 2003"!

and

He asked "Who was the smartest person ever?"

compared to

Can you believe that there were "63 murders per 100,000 people in Columbia in 2003"?

So, there's your punctuation lesson for the day. As a parting shot, triple exclamation marks don't emphasize things any more than a single exclamation mark. It's just plain gratuitous. Straight up.