Gawd - "Little Orphan Annie" decoder wheels? Haven't see those in years!
As I learned it 'way back when, it didn't much matter whether punctuation went inside or outside of the quote marks depended on use...
When quoting another person, it goes inside.
When used to indicate a spoken part in a body of text, it goes inside.
When quote marks are used to set aside a "common phrase," it goes outside (thus preserving the integrity of the phrase.)
Punctuation invariably goes inside of parenthesis. When parenthesis are to be "stacked," you change the character from parenthesis to braces/brackets - and again if you go another layer down. ([{}]) This also allows you to "logically" group your side thoughts - either as an aside that is part of another aside, an aside that leads to another, ...
"Points of ellipses" (...) are only three periods, always have a leading space, and are used in situations like the above (essentially, where one knows there are other situations that can apply, elements of the list, or what-have-you, but you can't be arsed to think of them.)
HOMOPHONES - Just because they sound the same doesn't mean they're spelled the same!
It's - contraction for "it is."
Its - third-person neuter possessive pronoun.
Their - third-person collective possessive pronoun.
They're - contraction for "they are."
There - preposition used to indicate a location not immediate to the speaker (usually accompanied by pointing in the direction desired or to the location referred.)
"Our/Ours" - first-person plural (collective) possessive.
"Hour/Hours" - A unit of time - 1/24th of a day, or sixty minutes.
ENDING SENTENCES WITH PREPOSITIONS - The jury is still out on this one! It's a holdover from when Latin was considered the "ideal" language of academe, and in Latin it is impossible to place a preposition at the end of a sentence. Therefore, the rule was transferred to English - making it "bad form" but no less possible than it had been. Yes, you can restructure a sentence to place the preposition somewhere other than last. Yes, it makes you sound stilted. (Side Note - "A preposition is anywhere a mouse can go.")
Similar to points of elllipses (above,) we have et cetera - which can be abbreviated either "etc." (note presence of a period, indicating an abbreviation) or "&c" (note period again.) Both are acceptable, and are largely a matter of form.
"Et al" is similar - and is used exactly as shown (less quote marks, and taking conventional rules of capitalisation into account.) It is used largely in place of points of ellipses - but usually the context is that compleating the list would take too long or take up too much space.
"Chat Speak" belongs in a "chat room" - and nowhere bloody else! Don't use it in open forum, don't use it in conventional writing, and please - for the love of God and all that you hold holy - do not use it in any draft of a formal paper! When I took English (uni-level!) a few years ago, my first drafts were in better shape than most of the final revisions that got handed in! Bear in mind that most of these kids were six months or so out of high school, while I'd been out for a good fifteen years!
Yes, these are all things that bother me to varying degrees. Yes, there is no excuse whatever for them - apart from sheer laziness or pure bloody-mindedness (yes, I tend to use British English more than American. There are various reasons for this, not the least of which happens to have been English teachers in middle school and high school. I started doing it to annoy them...) Yes, I see most of them here.
I'm about to start not answering people who seem to lack the wit to ask questions properly. Perhaps I should - I did the same thing with my two boys, and their speaking improved immensely...
(Step One - Eliminate the word "like" from your vocabulary. No-one will think less of you if you stop to organise your throughts - unless you make some idiotic noise while you're doing it...)
(Some call me "The Pink Pedanther." I may not be very pink, but I can get pedantic - so I suppose it fits...)
