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by sellyme 1705 days ago
The American equivalent identifier is including punctuation (full stops, periods, sometimes even question marks) inside quotations, even when that punctuation was never part of the quote.

Although that seems to be much less common online than in print.

4 comments

As an American, I refuse to do this. The purpose of written language is to share information. When using a quote, you'ra trying to share what was said/written. Ergo, adding arbitrary punctuation when it wasn't in the original quote defeats both the purpose of the quote and the writing.
It’s literally AP style.

And never made any sense to me.

AP exists for English teachers to be able to quantify their largely unquantifiable profession in some way. In order to keep cashing in on the sham, they continue to rewrite their rules yearly to be more bizarre and unintuitive every time.
You might be thinking of the APA style guide. I think the parent was talking about the AP Stylebook, which is the style guide used by the Associated Press.
Yes, Associated Press. And to clarify, that style (at least back when I was doing this) was typically followed by print publications, as the “standard.”

A notable exception being the New York Times, but now we are at the edge of my knowledge about this.

I’m grateful it’s falling out of favor, even when I was taught this rule and eager to follow rules I found it absurd. If everyone follows the rule I good faith it’s still easy to misconstrue or mischaracterize a quote by accident.
Dutch people are taught to do this as well.