The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Going Dotty About Punctuation Gordon Woolf |
| Gordon Woolf highlights another of the important differences |
It is normal in the USA to put punctuation inside quote marks, so if you were in Melbourne in Florida you would type an instruction as follows:
At the dialog box, where it asks for password, type "password."
But that's not likely to be what it appears; the instruction really means to say that you should type "password" without the dot.
I would have to extend or continue the sentence in order to avoid having to put a dot in a ridiculous place.
Australian punctuation rules generally follow the English style which is to put the punctuation in relation to
quotation marks where they make sense, instead of following a strict rule of order, so if a full sentence was being quoted, you'd have "This is my password".
But if it was just the word "password" that is the password, in Melbourne, Victoria, you would write:
In the dialog box, where it asks for password, type "password".
Reprinted from the June 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
