The Word Cloud

Damn first-post formatting - please see below.

Check the ends of these sentences. Would you leave a space between the quote marks (example 1) or not (example 2)? Editors appear to bicker over this...

“He told me, ‘Don’t bother with Absolute Write forums – stick to the Word Cloud.’ ”

“He told me, ‘Don’t bother with Absolute Write forums – stick to the Word Cloud.’”

I'm not sure what the actual answer is about the spacing as I would always rewrite to avoid the sort of quote you have above e.g. "He told me not to bother with Absolute Write forums but to stick to the Word Cloud." That way, there's no problem and it doesn't matter if you don't know whether there is spacing or not

Thanks for that profoundly helpful answer!

Next!

All the books I have read don't leave a space, but I like Skylark's solution because triple speech marks look so untidy...

No, don't leave a space - though I agree it looks a bit squished up. It doesn't matter what manuscripts look like in that sense, because they're not trying to look like a proper book (It's easy for us to forget this, now that WP programs can do quite a good job of looking like a book.) It's more important to be plain vanilla. A typesetter would be rather un-thrilled with you if they to go fish the space out between ' and '' each time. (Though not as un-thrilled as if you'd done the paragraph indents with the space bar. A lot of people still do.)

Agreed, ST – very untidy. But Skylark’s solution isn’t a solution because unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the example sentence is there for example purposes only and not snipped from a debut novel titled WAR OF THE FORUMS…

And thanks, Emma – though I must admit I indent with the space bar…Oh dear…