From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 10:39:21 EST
Mark Davis had written:
> First, the ` is not a quote mark: it is a grave accent/ Second, it
> also doesn/t say that you can/t use a slash/ say/ instead of a comma/
> apostrophe/ or period/ But that doesn/t mean it/s a good idea/
Doug Ewell had written:
> It's a terrible idea. I hate ``this quoting convention" (or
> alternatively ``this one'') as much as anyone.
John Delacour wrote:
> It's a very good idea if you consider that it enables us-ascii text to
> be easily converted to nicely formatted text containing curly quotes
> pointing in the right directions, which is the reason for the convention.
Of course, you can adopt any convention for input if you are willing to
transform your opus to standard orthography before sending it out.
However, the problem with conventions like this one is that many people
take the surrogate for the real thing. I think both Mark and Doug were
referring to the uneducated disemination of wrongly spelled quotes, via
e-mail -- or even in www pages, where you can easily have the correct
quote characters, viz. “ and ”.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
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