The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".
>> <i>If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)." I don't doubt Feal, but the appearance argument doesn't carry much heft today; more to the point is that we are simply accustomed to the style.</i><p>This is the real story here I think: people invented the rule to suit their preferences, but over time we've forgotten the rule's origin and now treat it like a holy truth. (Or worse yet a matter of "grammar"! Run, run - you've made a grammatical mistake!)  You are likely to discover this over and over again if you study the background of many rules that (some) writing teachers insist on and that people like Lynn Truss use as an excuse to foam at the mouth.<p>Here are some of my least-favorite myths, in no particular order:<p>+ You should never end a sentence with a preposition. (Sheer bullshit: English uses countless phrasal verbs ('throw away') and in many other cases avoiding the final preposition produces stuffy nonsense.)<p>+ You should never split an infinitive. (A completely made-up rule, based on mistakenly trying to apply Latin rules to a Germanic language.)<p>+ The word 'hopefully' can only mean 'in a hopeful spirit' and therefore you shouldn't say, "Hopefully, we'll arive before lunch tomorrow." (Sheer bullshit again: 'hopefully' there functions as an adverb modifying the entire clause 'we'll arrive before lunch tomorrow'. The sentence as a whole clearly and obviously means "It is to be hoped that..." or less formally "We hope that..." This use of 'hopefully' is no different than 'fortunately', 'sadly', 'happily' or 'luckily' in countless sentences.)<p>+ Don't start sentences with 'but' or 'and' or 'however'. (Just goofy.)<p>+ Never use the passive voice. (Overdoing it at the least: Yes, a lot of beauraucratic and other bad writing uses the passive in excess, but the passive is not <i>per se</i> evil or always wrong.)