Angulowl

Quotation, the New American Way

BALTIMORE, MD--Ronald Paulson, distinguished emeritus professor in the humanities at Johns Hopkins University, has just written a groundbreaking work in literature and art history.  Entitled The Art of Riot in England and America, it is also a landmark publication in the history of English grammar.  Herein, Paulson throws down the gauntlet to writers of US English, challenging Americans to switch to his practice of now standardly putting commas and periods outside of quotation marks.

     His reform is aimed at improving the written logic of sentences containing quoted material.  It simply happens that his practice has long been in use among writers of British English--he insists.  To be sure, The Art of Riot is made in the USA.  It is issued under the imprint Owlworks, a press sponsored by an American philological society that specializes in scholarly publications.  It joins a spate of books that include The Political Imagination in History, which showcases the epicene pronoun hu, and The Revenue of the Sovereign, which prescribes a new way of choosing between the restrictive relative pronouns that and which.

     Last year, Owlworks brought out The Seven Deadly Sins of Legal Writing, by Theodore L. Blumberg.  This work fired the acclaimed trial lawyer Gerry Spence to declare: "Under penalty of disbarment this book should be read and understood by every lawyer, most of whom forgot they, and the judges who read their miserable briefs, are human beings".  N.B.  The words are Gerry Spence's.  But, for the logic of their signposted quotation, we have Paulson to thank.