I’ve always thought the British style puts an awkward amount of space between a comma or period and the word preceding it. It’s even worse if you start using it with American-style double quotes.
Interesting discussion here on blog of the Chicago Manual of Style, which supports the American convention:
But notice how the commas and the period in the example of Chicago style appear consistently right next to the words they follow [...], creating a pleasing uniformity along the baseline. In British style, placement is interrupted by the quotation marks, though the gap is smaller than it would be with double rather than single marks.
Personally, I alternate between the two styles like a total maniac.
I’ve always thought the British style puts an awkward amount of space between a comma or period and the word preceding it. It’s even worse if you start using it with American-style double quotes.
Interesting discussion here on blog of the Chicago Manual of Style, which supports the American convention:
Personally, I alternate between the two styles like a total maniac.
I personally think quotation-over-punctuation would solve this nicely. Here’s an example from someone who managed to have his TeX documents do exactly that: