There are many writeups on E2 describing the “traditional” rules governing the relative positioning of commas and quotation marks, describing the alternative
ruleset known as “
logical punctuation”, and explaining how the latter is superior to the former.
Herewith, I present an
apology for the traditional style; not because I prefer it, but because I enjoy defending
unpopular causes, and because, more seriously, unpopular causes sometimes look less unpopular once you understand them properly.
It should make an interesting
counterpoint to
Gritchka's writeup, though it wasn't written as a
rebuttal thereto. Rather, it was composed as an email (hence its
uncompromisingly
terse style) in response to a friend who asks:
Why should the comma come inside the quotation
marks when it's not part of the quoted speech? Why
does there have to be a comma at all, when it
separates the verb from its object?
You'll
observe that the sentence
“I'm going,” he said.
does not conform to a normal English
word order if you think that ‘“I'm going”’
is the object of ‘said’. In fact it conforms to an
abnormal English word order
which lays great stress on the object, as in:
The penguins I at least asked for help. The pot plants
I merely glanced at in despair.
It might even be
permissible to use a comma after the
object in the above
sentences. But there's a much better interpretation, especially when you
consider that not only is your original sentence not thought of as an
unusual sentence
permutation, but neither is:
“I'm going,” he said, “to have tea.”
To wit, the expression ‘he said’ is
parenthetical in
all direct speech,
and for this reason is
set off in commas. The
main verb of the sentence
quoting the direct speech is "am [going]"—
inside the inverted commas.
(This is not to say that ‘to say’ cannot take a
direct object; consider:
She said no.
They said Mass.)
This theory also explains conveniently why one might (in the context of
a
dialogue in which it is clear who is speaking) present alone as a
complete sentence:
“I'm going.”
And it justifies the
convention in some
popular European languages of
not closing the inverted commas merely to indicate the speaker:
„Je m'en vais, a-t-il dit, pour que je prenne le thé.”
However, it leaves one unhappy with the sentence (on whose validity I'd
be interested in an opinion):
“I'm going,” he said, and went.
But I'd be prepared to consider allowing
“I'm going,” he said, and he went.
because, once one has allowed that ‘“I'm going”’ is a sentence, what more
natural than to concatenate it with another using ‘and’? Unfortunately this
opens the door to the unnatural-seeming:
“I'm going,” and he went.
The positioning of the commas is more complicated to explain. You will note
that there is a convention, more
æsthetic than grammatical, that the
comma,
colon,
semicolon and
full stop are closely allied to the preceding
word (in a way that quotation marks, for example, are not) and come as
close to it as possible. Thus the comma
after ‘he said’ certainly comes
before the open quotes, because the open quotes come after the space and
the comma comes before it, and to position them otherwise is intolerable by
any known standards.
Nevertheless, the idea that the comma should come after the close quotes
comes from your mistaken parsing of the sentence as:
XXXXXXX, he said.
where XXXXXXX is the object of the sentence, and any internal structure or
meaning it may appear to have is an
illusion and to be ignored. If, instead,
you read XXXXXXX as the main clause as I have been advocating, it instantly
becomes living, breathing language, and after its last word becomes a fine
place to put a comma owing to the æsthetic
considerations I describe above.
To put it another way, the comma must come immediately after a word, and
once you stop treating XXXXXXX, including its quotation marks, as a word for
grammatical purposes, it is no longer valid to put a comma after the quotes.
How 'm I noding? 1-800-MSG-APOT