English usage and grammar

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A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.

If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]).

Online resources:

Cambridge English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. This is a great and witty reference about usage, its history, and its controveries

Sibling communities:

!english_esl@lemmy.ml

Rules of conduct:

The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.

(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)

founded 2 years ago

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I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. (marcusolang.substack.com)

submitted 3 months ago by mo_lave@reddthat.com to c/english@lemmy.ca

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[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

[British] I'm fairly sure I was taught to put the full stop before the closing quote, but that's perhaps only for dialogue?

[–] Deebster@infosec.pub 1 points 3 months ago

It was that you could use quoted punctuation to punctuate a sentence, but you shouldn't quote anything that's not part of the quote. For example, you wouldn't say

The first word of that popular birthday song is "happy."

This would suggest that the first line goes "Happy. Birthday to you" whereas you could just finish after the quote: first word is "happy".

Also, compare

He said "hello"?
He said "hello?"
He said "hello?"?

All mean different things, although that last one does look very odd.