An
alternative to conventional
punctuation which specifies the placement of
periods,
commas, and
exclamation marks outside of
quotation marks when they do not belong in the
quote.
For example:
If he told you, "Eat a mammal", then you should.
as opposed to:
If he told you, "Eat a mammal," then you should.
The
driving force of this
reform probably comes from the
proliferation of
etext, especially in the form of
email. As a new
medium for
information exchange that differs significantly from
print,
electronic writers are developing new
conventions to replace those that no longer
work. In the case of
quotes, because of the spacing of
computer text,
quotation marks hover far from the actual
quote and look rather
silly and may even convey
false information.
For example:
Mail me! My username is "J1TN-23."
where the period is not part of the person's username.
In addition, logical punctuation resembles the way a
computer programmer would separate
strings of
text; a
comma appears outside the
quotes because it separates the strings but is not part of any string. Hence the "
logical" aspect.