Disturbing development

Quotation marks
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I hadn’t heard of the “logical punctuation” movement.

I’m not really disturbed so much by the continued evolution of language to a looser, more informal style. But to learn that there has long been debate over where to put punctuation marks in relation to quotation marks? I’ve always thought that was ironclad.

Periods, commas, question marks, exclamation points, colons, etc., always, always, always belong inside the quotation marks. Apparently that’s not so, according to some. So this is currently rocking my world. And also causing me to go back to the galleys of the book, where I believe I pontificated on this very thing.

A grammar chapter. I’m not even sure why I did it now. It started out as fun — everyone has their peeves and most writers like hearing about the things that bug other writers.

I suppose that remains to be seen.