New answers tagged punctuation
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Is the use of a semicolon in the sentence 'The south sided with the King; the north with the usurper.' correct?
The convention is that only clauses which are independent can be separated by a semicolon. Your second clause is not independent and therefore should be separated from the first with a comma.
Your ...
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Nested quotations & internal commas: an edge case
What did Bob say? "Hello." — probably with a period after it. One convention (I believe there are others) is to turn periods into commas when you quote text and the period doesn't fall at ...
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Nested quotations & internal commas: an edge case
There is absolutely no need for the commas before the reported speech. Either of them.
The best version of this sentence is:
Alice says "Bob said 'Hello,'" and she smiles at the memory.
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- 25.2k
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Punctuations and Closing Quotation Mark
Where the quote is just a single sentence (or less), then I close the quote before adding the full stop. But where there are multiple full stops within the quote, then I put the last one within the ...
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Is it ok to have a semicolon after a colon or em dash? (or other variations)
Robert Louis Stevenson writes, in The Adventure of the Hansom Cab [The Literature Network]:
The drawing-room began to look empty: the baccarat was discontinued for lack of a banker; more than one ...
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What do you call a symbol "—||—" for repeating something that has already been written? Does it have a name at all?
As Fumblefingers noted, this is a form of ditto mark.
Wikipedia notes that the form -----"----- is used in Russian, Swedish, and Norwegian.
Also, some extension of Latex can do these
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What do you call a symbol "—||—" for repeating something that has already been written? Does it have a name at all?
FumbleFingers commented:
I'd say it's just a somewhat florid / ornate (non-standard? idiosyncratic?) ditto mark.
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