Six Questions for Blogger, cont.

The subject of this series is the amateurish and ineffective explanations and directions on Google's Blogger, the site that hosts this blog. Earlier posts in this series appear below.

Question #3: Are you aware that there’s a difference between American and British punctuation? If so, why do you use British punctuation, which, incidentally, is not the norm on other Google sites?

Any half-competent beginning editor can cite a dozen differences, among many more, between American and British written and spoken English related to spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, and usage. Oddly, Blogger seems unaware of one of the most basic and best known differences: In America, periods and commas are almost always—exceptions are very rare—placed inside terminal quotation marks, "like this." In the UK, the opposite is true: periods and commas go outside terminal quotation marks, "like this".

Official text in Blogger uses the British system. Here's one example (in red), copied from the Settings menu for the option, "Add your blog to our listings?"

If you select "Yes" we will include your blog in Google Blog Search and ping Weblogs.com. If you select "No", everyone can still view your blog but search engines will be instructed not to crawl it.

Now, listen; I live in the real world and know that this is a minor infraction. Most Blogger users will not notice and fewer will object. But errors like this accumulate, and though their effects cannot be measured like hits to a web ad, there's no question they affect the user experience, and ultimately, influence loyalty.

The people behind the curtain at Blogger either don't care about text quality and effective written communication or don't know how to achieve it. It's also possible, of course, that Blogger editors, if there are any, have consciously adopted the British system. But I doubt it. This and other evidence at Blogger.com suggests that nobody at Blogger pays much attention to effective written communication.

There's a second tell-tale error in the sentence quoted above, which leads to the next question in this series. Stay tuned....