Unmatched Punctuation Check mishandles quotations that continue across paragraph breaks

Question

When I run the Unmatched Pairs of Punctuation Check (PT 8 or 9), almost every opening quotation mark that starts a quote spanning multiple paragraphs is marked as an error.

check error1088×542 190 KB

In the options panel for Unmatched Pairs of Punctuation Checking Inventory, we have selected “No” as the value for “Close By End Of Paragraph”:

inventory761×617 42.4 KB

We have also set up the Quotation Rules properly, as far as I can tell:

quotation rules837×700 101 KB

Of course, in the Checking Inventory we can mark the errors as “Valid”, but that means checking each one individually (making the Checking tool worthless in this case!).

Any ideas on how to resolve this problem?

Answer 1

In this example, the quotation marks should not be included in the Unmatched Pairs of Punctuation Inventory. The Unmatched Pairs of Punctuation inventory should be used to locate places where pairs don’t match - for example parentheses. In this case, since you will have quotation continuers it is clear that the punctuation won’t “match”.

If you do not use continuers then it is possible to add quotation marks to this inventory, but generally quotation marks should be handled by the quotation check.

Answer 2

Thanks, anon848905. I had assumed that PT decided what to put in the inventory – I guess someone on our team did it (maybe me a long time ago!). I’ll pull the quotation marks out.