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That people believe this is 100% true. Whether or not it actually is true has never been confirmed. Please do not disparage other forms of punctuation without proof.
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{{FAQ row
{{FAQ row
|q=Why does the Manual of Style mandate the use of logical quotation?
|q=Why does the Manual of Style mandate the use of [[logical quotation]]?
|a=The "[[logical quotation]]" system is more precise than "typesetters' quotation" and thus does a better job of preserving the quoted text without ambiguity.
|a=Many Wikipedians believe that this system does a better job of preserving the quoted text without ambiguity.
}}
}}



Revision as of 14:43, 5 January 2010

Wikipedia's Manual of Style sometimes has conventions that differ from other well-known style manuals and from what is often taught in schools. These differences are usually deliberate and have been discussed in great detail. New contributors are advised to check the FAQ and the archives to see if their concern has already been discussed.

To view an explanation to the answer, click the [show] link to the right of the question.

Why does the Manual of Style forbid the use of curly or typographic quotes and apostrophes (the characters , , , and )?
Readers may only know how to type in straight quotes (such as " and ') when searching for text within a page, and Web browsers do not currently find curly quotes when users type straight quotes.
Why does the Manual of Style mandate the use of logical quotation?
Many Wikipedians believe that this system does a better job of preserving the quoted text without ambiguity.
Why does the Manual of Style permit the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun?
Singular they has been used for hundreds of years by some of the best writers in the English language.
Why does the Manual of Style distinguish between hyphens (-), en dashes (), em dashes (), and minus signs ()?
Using different glyphs for different purposes improves readability. Using hyphens everywhere would make certain constructions ambiguous (for example, an em dash meant to set off a short bit of text from the surrounding text could be confused with a compound adjective) or illegible (for example, a minus sign in a superscript is legible, but some fonts render hyphens so small that they become hard to read).