Evidence Explained citation format - why is comma inside quotes?

Question

I'm trying to fully understand the Evidence Explained format but I do not have a copy of the book so I'm going by what is online. In the EE style parts of the citation are separated by commas - but strangely, in the case of the database title, the comma is put inside the quotes. This seems illogical to me but perhaps someone with more knowledge of EE can explain the rationale.

Here is an EE doc that shows it (see the section "First (Full) Reference Note").

I thought it might be a typo but it is the same in this discussion of how to use EE for Ancestry records.

There are various projects on WikiTree that say they try to follow EE but they are inconsistent in their citation examples about things like this.

FamilySearch has citations on the page that follow a similar format but they put the comma after the close quotation. e.g.:

"Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XTXN-PTY : 12 February 2020), Alexander Hardie, 1881.

I am working on some options for WikiTree Sourcer that would make the generated citations more Evidence Explained style but this point is confusing me.

Comments

I should have googled the question first. I found an answer here: https://style.mla.org/the-placement-of-a-comma-or-period-after-a-quotation/

It still seems weird to me but maybe that is because I grew up in England!

Does this reasoning only apply to the printed page or is there a good reason to put the comma inside the quotes in a WikiTree citation?

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Another link on the MLA site says:

This placement is traditional in the United States. William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, writing in 1959, noted that “[t]ypographical usage dictates the comma be inside the marks, though logically it seems not to belong there” (36). In other words, in the predigital era, when fonts were fixed-width, setting a period or comma outside the quotation marks would have created an unsightly gap: 

But Robert Bringhurst, writing in the era of digital fonts, maintains that it generally “makes no typographic difference” if quotation marks “follow commas and periods or precede them” (87). Digital typographers can close up the gap:

The convention nonetheless remains.

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It's always seemed strange to me, as I was taught that everything inside the quotation marks (which we called "inverted commas") was removable and if you remove the punctuation you frequently get left with an unclosed sentence.  (Same with parentheses.)
Weird, eh?  

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 The UK MHRA style guide has the comma after  quotes.  https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/referencing-style-guides/mhra

Ralph Fiennes, quoted in Mark Brown, ‘Ralph Fiennes: Michael Gove is just like Richard III’, The Guardian, 19 July 2016.

Edwin Honig, ‘Calderón’s Strange Mercy Play’, in Critical Essays on the Theatre of Calderón, ed. by Bruce W. Wardropper (New York: New York University Press, 1965), pp. 167–92 (first publ. in Massachusetts Review, 3 (1961), 80–107).

Thankfully,  we don't yet have a database error for incorrect punctuation in a citation. Thank goodness,  Getting a dissertation  correctly cited  for my MA, using MHRA,  took days and lots of sweat and tears. 

Edit added another example

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This is the way I learned it: the comma goes inside the quotation mark.

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It is the difference between American and other.

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I don't think anyone should care which style you use, but as an American, I think the English rule is better because the American rule makes it impossible to tell whether the punctuation is part of the original wording that is being quoted.

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I think the English rule is better because the American rule makes it impossible to tell whether the punctuation is part of the original wording that is being quoted.

THIS!  As an American, I really dislike this style rule.  Don't even get me started on the Oxford comma.

As for Evidence Explained, it appears to depend on whether the American double quotation marks are used or the British single quotation marks.  The relevant section is 2.71 Placement of Punctuation.  COMMAS & PERIODS:  "Commas go inside double quotation marks and usually appear outside single quotation marks."  Under QUOTATION MARKS, "The closing double quotation mark is placed inside a semicolon.  It is placed outside a comma or a period.  If the quoted matter is itself a question, then the question mark also goes inside the closing quotation mark...If single quotation mark are used around a word or phrase in the so-called sense, then the closing quotation mark is placed before a colon, comma, period, question mark, or semicolon.  If single quotation marks are used for a quotation inside of other quoted matter, then the closing mark usually belongs before all other punctuation marks.  If the quoted matter itself is a question, then the question mark also goes before the single closing quotation mark."

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Another link on the MLA site says:

This placement is traditional in the United States. William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, writing in 1959, noted that “[t]ypographical usage dictates the comma be inside the marks, though logically it seems not to belong there” (36). In other words, in the predigital era, when fonts were fixed-width, 

 ... blah, blah, blah ...

What an terrible excuse, complete nonsense, experts my ar*e. In pre digital days, ie when we had metal type the comma did not take up the same space as other characters. Most typefaces used for printing books, papers and magazines were proportional. Each character was cast to be an exact width as appropriate to its width, so a comma was narrow, an M was wide etc. In some typefaces the commas could even have a slight overhang so that the tale would fit snuggly over the edge of the preceding letters block. The only exceptions to this would be a monoface typeface, the sort of typeface that was often found on typewriters. This is what is being compared in the example, and were unlikely to be used in books nor for that matter on most printed material.

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I thought the same thing when I read that. Typesetters also used a technique called "kerning" to avoid unsightly gaps. This is now done automatically by software in browsers etc.

For example when you put a W next to an A it moves them closer together: WAWA

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Yes kerning was done usually to increase the gaps between characters by inserting tiny slithers of metal between the metal characters until a visually pleasing result was achieved. Now of course we can do negative or positive kerning to decrease or increase the space between characters.

I actually did hand typesetting and hot metal machine setting as well as computer setting at college as part of my training. So their statement made me see red! grrrrr. Calm now 

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I'd love to get you started on the Oxford comma (which I've also heard called the Harvard comma.) I am a proponent of it as there are many cases in which it is required to avoid ambiguity.

I do agree that putting commas inside quotation marks seems to be a nuisance without a rationale.

Answer 1

Since this is a US convention and not truly important, I don't see a need to enforce it. It would likely only be an issue if someone was planning to publish in a journal that specifies EE citations. We should be a bit flexible with that.

This is what was drilled into my in school so it is second nature but the non-US style makes total sense to me.