Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(But note that it is not essential to quote such a dull statement as “open sets are of
insufficient power”; paraphrase, or even simply omitting the quote symbols, would
be more appropriate. Omission of quotation marks in this case is acceptable—that is,
not plagiarism—because Crosley's statement is a natural way to express the concept.)
If the material in the quotation marks is a literal string, the punctuation must go
outside. Since most punctuation symbols have meaning in programming languages,
when programming statements are quoted the matter in the quote will be syntactically
incorrect if the punctuation is in the wrong place.
One of the reserved words in C is “for.”
One of the reserved words in C is “for”.
Some editors change this to the wrong form. You may prefer to avoid the problem
altogether.
One of the reserved words in C is
for
.
Note that the angled or smart quotation symbols (“ and ”) are not the same as the
straight ASCII double-quote symbol (").
Parentheses
A sentence containing a statement in parentheses should be punctuated exactly as if
the parenthetical statement was not there.
Most quantities are small (but there are exceptions.)
Most quantities are small (but there are exceptions).
(Note that outlying points have been omitted).
(Note that outlying points have been omitted.)
Parenthetical remarks should be asides that the reader can ignore—important text
should not be in parentheses. In particular, don't introduce information in parentheses
that is referred to later. The same rule applies to footnotes. If you think some text
should be relegated to a footnote, perhaps it can be deleted.
Overuse of parentheses looks crowded. Avoid havingmore than one parenthesized
remark per paragraph, or more than a couple per page. Parentheses within parentheses
are hard to read and look like typing errors. Get rid of them.
The use of “(s)” to denote the possibility of a plural, as in “any observed error(s)”,
is ugly and unnecessary; omit the parentheses or recast the sentence.
