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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
grammar experts, come in!
I normally consider myself good at grammar, but I don't know what to do in this situation.
This is my sentence:
The low PPV in patients > 2 weeks PNA indicates that there wre many "false positives;" in other words, the Score indicated treatment in many cases in which treatment was not given.
My question is about the quotes and the semicolon. I know in general punctuation should go before the end quote, but this looks weird to me. Is this right? Or should I split it up into 2 sentences?
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Re: grammar experts, come in!
I'm not positive, but I think the way you have it is correct, though I agree that it looks weird. I would probably split it into two sentences.
In this case, the semi-colon should go after the quotation marks. The semi-colon refers to the section that I have highlighted and not just the part you have in quotation marks.
If you were using quotation marks in the sense that you were quoting someone (for example someone speaking in a book) you would have the semi-colon within the quotation marks.
BTW, you do realise you have a typo in there too?
Hope that helps
ETA : Think about what the punctuation mark relates to in general - is it the phrase or just the quote?
Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, so how you have it is correct.
My question, however, is why the phrase false positives is in quotation marks. Unless it is a direct quote from a source, I really don't see the need to set it off in quotation marks.
hmm, so much to think about. thanks!
first off, irish - yeah, sorry about the typo, I copy-pasted from my document and the formatting got all screwed up so I retyped it, that's where the typo came from. but thank you!
dorothyinAus - I don't like having it in quotes, but I don't know how else to do it. It's not a direct quote, it's that I'm using the phrase false positives in a case when I'm not actually talking about false positives. I'm using it to make the explanation of my statistics easier. My supervisor didn't say anything, but you're right, I should try to figure out a way to get rid of them. Just not sure how I'd explain it otherwise.
I agree that the phrase false positive is well-known enough to not require quotations. That would get rid of your grammar quandry.
In British grammar, the semi-colon would go outside the quotes. In American english, it goes inside. I prefer british english, but then you need to make sure you continue that throughout the paper.
I'd simplify things and say this:
The low PPV in patients > 2 weeks PNA indicates that there were many false positives. The Score indicated treatment in many cases in which treatment was not given.
Yeah I guess I'll take it out of quotes. I totally agree that false positives is a well-known term, it's just that what I'm talking about isn't REALLY false positives, I'm just using that term to explain another concept. But I think if I reword it a little bit, I can make it work.
thanks!