s&r, picky is good. Thanks for stirring me to check further.

Most of the older style manuals I have insist that the close quote goes after the other punctuation. I think this must have come from some convention that printers used to follow. There were several oddball things printers used to do that involved protecting easily damaged letters in moveable type when moveable type was made of soft lead, and many of these conventions didn't help the sense of what one was trying to say (such as the position of the quotes). It always seemed more sensible to me, depending on intended meaning, to put the exclamation point or question mark after the close quote, but when I did, teacher invariably circled it with her red pencil. Since I write with publication in mind, I generally attempt to follow standard manuscript practices, so I try to stick pretty close to the style manuals even when I do think something they prescribe is kinda dumb.

However—as I flipped through my copy of Rules for Writers: A Concise Handbook (Second Edition) by Diana Hacker, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1988 (one of my favorites, because things are easy to find and clearly stated), she says differently. "Put commas and periods inside the quotation marks," BUT "Put question marks and exclamation points inside the quotation marks unless they apply to the sentence as a whole" [emphasis mine]. Ah, SO! That makes a heck of a lot more sense. Things have changed since I was in high school (understatement of the year!). I'm going to reevaluate some of the older manuals I have and maybe clean a few out.

They say that a man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never quite sure. Same with style manuals, I guess.

I didn't check "thesaurus" in the OED, I did a "quick and dirty" by looking it up on the Tom Swift magical electric Merriam-Webster I have on my computer. It gives both "thesauri" and "thesauruses" as plurals, but I picked the former just 'cause I'm some kind of a wise guy (as in "smart-ass").

The em dash? For some reason the "alt 0151" doesn't work on my computer. You can get it two ways that I know of: click on Insert > Symbol > Special Characters tab, and there's a list of wild and hairy stuff there, such as ©, ®, §, and several others. The em dash is on the list; but you'll note that it gives you keyboard shortcuts as well. Much faster and easier. For the em dash, hold down CTRL and ALT, and press the minus sign on the number pad. Presto!!

Don Firth