: Re: Software to change American punctuation to British My apologies if this is off topic. American and British writing have different punctuation styles. Is there any software that can change American

@Courtney562

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British born and UK resident for longer than I'd care to mention joining the answers here, and I'm sorry but (it doesn't get any more British than that) the example in the question just looks wrong to me.

The problem seems to be with the word "quotation". I would agree that the UK style would use punctuation outside inverted commas (single or double is a whole different style question) where something was attributed to someone, but this wouldn't happen for direct speech.

Today's "Guardian" has some good examples in the same article :

Russia was reacting to “absolutely unacceptable actions that are taken
against us under very harsh pressure from the United States and
Britain under the pretext of the so-called Skripal case”, Lavrov said.

[attributed]

“British authorities finally spoke today about Yulia Skripal’s
condition. As people say, she’s on the mend quickly. And we have
demanded again that we are given access to Yulia, as a Russian
citizen,” Lavrov said, Interfax reported.

[direct speech]

Both of which look right (as far as I'm concerned) in context.

Getting back to the question, I don't think software is currently sophisticated enough to know whether it's dealing with speech or an attributed quotation. This may be one of those things where there's no effective substitute for a local editor.

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