: 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

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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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First of all, while it's true that there are many different styles, there is still definitely a "British punctuation" versus an "American punctuation" at a generic level. What you have flagged as "American" is almost always used throughout North America without exception(*). And while there is more variation in Great Britain, what you have given as "British" is still widely used there.

(*) In North America, some style guides do allow for a mix of "British" and "American". For example, The Chicago Manual of Style (6.9) says that the British style (using single quotation marks) “may be appropriate in works of textual criticism or in computer coding and other technical or scientific settings.” This is necessary when text styling is unavailable, and putting a punctuation character inside quotation marks could lead to confusion with text that is meant to be communicated literally: (1) Type the password "123." versus (2) Type the password '123'.

Aside from search and replace on the quotation marks themselves, an editing tool called PerfectIt will let you choose if you want final punctuation inside or outside of quotes. Unfortunately (and ironically), it's not perfect when it comes to the British style; but I can't see how it could be. Short of artificial intelligence, software can't tell if what's inside quotation marks is actually part of quoted dialog or just a quoted "fragment" of text. And the British style does put punctuation inside of quotation marks if it's part of a sentence's broader grammatical structure.

'The pears,' he said, "apples and other fruit have all dried out.'
The pears, apples and other fruit have all dried out.

The comma is part of the spoken sentence here, so it does come before the quotation mark---even in the so-called British style. (As does the period.) Adding quotation marks and narrative text doesn't change the punctuation of the quoted dialog itself. (Note: As most, but not all, British style guides avoid using a serial comma, I left it out.)

However, PerfectIt will flag such instances and let you decide if they should be fixed or not.

As much as the (common) British style makes more logical sense to me (even though I don't normally use it), the American style is easier from a programming point of view.

But while you can find tools that let you get close to automatic styling, there is really no substitute for learning the particulars. (If you rely on any automated tool, it will let you down at some point as far as this is concerned.)

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Firstly, what you've posted isn't an example of British punctuation: there's no such thing. The style of punctuation depends on the style guide you're using, and this is often dictated by the area you're writing for (e.g. scientific vs. creative). A friend of mine studied Geography and had to use, Harvard referencing and punctuation inside the quotes. When he did his masters (in Creative Writing) he had to learn to use single quotes, MHLA referencing and punctuation outside the quotes.

Punctuation should only go outside the quotes if it's a quote - not dialogue. If you're writing an essay in British English and quoting from a book, that's when the punctuation goes outside the quotation marks. However, many people agree that this looks ugly and a few people from my MA course (in Creative Writing) only used this because they had to.

Single quotes vs. double quotes varies from person to person. At school I was taught to use double quotes. When I did my MA, we were encouraged to use single (but could use double if we wished). The main reason we were told to use single was because double quotes inside single looks better than single inside double. A lot of the time, punctuation is as much about how it looks on the page as what its function is.

Punctuation between British and American English really isn't that different. The main issues are spelling and different words for things (for instance, biscuits, cookies and scones mean different things depending on if you speak to someone English or American). I'd be much more concerned about that than punctuation because it's far more difficult to spot and easier to get confused.

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Try find replace in whatever word processor you are using. Cmd+f or Ctrl+f and replace ,' with ',

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Maybe the answer is really quite simple. Any decent word processing program will pick up on all of the incorrect punctuation and spelling if you import an American document into a British system. So if you import an American doc with the sentence:

"What a lovely color," she said.

into a British system, it should squawk and flag things so you know to fix it up to be:

'What a lovely colour', she said.

by whatever hideously tedious means you invent.

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The idea that there are two styles is erroneous, as has been mentioned above. The 'rules' surrounding punctuation are becoming more relaxed year by year and, especially with the growth and use of the Internet, 'US' and 'UK' styles are becoming ever less easy to distinguish.

And since 'quotes are supposed to be exactly like the original', this would include importing a style possibly at variance with that used in the main body of the document.

That having been said, you might find this treatment of punctuation surrounding quotations interesting - even quite useful.

Though choosing to use double or single inverted commas in the first instance is more a matter of personal (maybe your editor's) choice, I tend to use double for direct speech, but single for other quotes, to signal novel/unusual words/usages, or perhaps the risky choice of a certain word ('scare quotes').

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