MLA 7th ed.: Periods and Quotation Marks within Titles

igessner

I run into problems with punctuation when the cited source ends with quotation marks. The period should be shifted to the left following the last character that is not a quotation mark, if I am not mistaken.

Example:

Gasché, Rodolphe. “... And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics’.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

should actually be

Gasché, Rodolphe. “... And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics.’” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Is this case too exotic to be dealt with in general?

adamsmith

I don't even know the rules for this, but putting it inside the inner quotation mark looks right (for American English).
That's not a style setting but something Zotero handles at a higher level, so first thing we'd have to make sure that this is a general rule of punctuation in American English. If it is, we should be able to fix that.

igessner

Thanks for the response. I don't have a canonical source at hand but for instance Rule 4 on this page (http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp) shows what I mean.

adamsmith

seems to be general for American English. See also APA:
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around-quotation-marks.html
Chicago Manual 6.11
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch06/ch06_sec011.html (gated)
and Owl
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/02/

(British English has entirely different rules, which we apply, I believe, correctly where en-GB is specified as the locale).

I'll let the processor maintainers know.

igessner

Thanks for the additional research and for forwarding the topic.

fbennett

I've made the adjustment in the processor. You can try it out by installing the processor patch plugin. Its only effect is to swap the most recent version of the CSL processor in to your running Zotero. When the next update to Zotero comes out, you can (and should) remove the plugin.

igessner

Thanks for the lightspeed fix. It works perfectly with the browser integrated version of Zotero (not with the current standalone one, which is no problem for me, I simply switched).