For the serious grammarians

[drwex]

Those of you who think creative spelling is amusing and refer to the punctuation-aware with pejorative terms can just skip right along.

Now, for the rest of us, I quote a sentence from a recent BBC New story:

Banksy has replaced Hilton's CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

I find the use of question mark-comma particularly odd. If that's appropriate, why not end the sentence with a period? Why not put the song titles in quotes, or at least italics? Discuss!

(original here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5310416.stm, link courtesy of coslinks)

Comments

[drwex]

See, it makes no sense to me to have in-sentence commas and leave off the trailing period.

As for the "all inside" rule, that's been superceded. The rule these days is that you put punctuation inside if it's relevant to the quote otherwise not.

So: He yelled "Get out of here!" at me.
and: He said something like "Get out".

are considered acceptable. See Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

I'd put the in-sentence commas to keep things clear and denote divisions between items. I'd put the final period in your "Get out" example inside because while it ends the sentence, it also ends the speaker's instruction. I've been meaning to read "ES&L." My list of Books To Read is growing faster than I can keep up. If I didn't have to work, I might be able to, but those cursed bibliographies make it a compounding problem...