Re. punctuation: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

I often assign one page response essays to writing prompts in my composition classes. A recent prompt was a Yogi Berra quote: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” The quote is also attributed to Albert Einstein, physicist, and Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, another physicist. Although Yogi did not originate the quote, he most certainly popularized it and gave it a humorous twist when he applied the concept to hitting a baseball coming at you at 100 mph.

One of the student responses included this sentence referring to an article she found: Yohan also said in his article, "How true is Yogi Berra's statement that, 'In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.'?", "There is always some aspect of nature that a theory does not fully capture."

My eye was immediately drawn to the six punctuation marks in a row which occur at the end of the article title which is rather long and has embedded elements requiring individual punctuation. So first there are quotation marks around the quote: ‘In theory . . . [blah, blah, blah] . . ..’ Single quote marks are used as this is a quote within an article title which is in double quote marks. Oh man, I just used ellipses on both side of my inserted “blah, blah, blah” into the quote indicating I eliminated some words from the quote and inserted others. And note the period after the last elipsis. Next there is the question mark [?] outside a single quote mark indicting the question is not part of the quotation itself but is a question about the quotation. The single quotation mark [‘] is a convention of punctuation for quotes within quotes: double quote marks [“] on the outside, single on the inside, and so on depending on how many quotes within quotes there are. And continuing from right to left in this punctuation string is a period at the end of the quote.
So in unpacking all this, I think the student nearly got it right, the only problem being the comma after the double quote mark. The comma should be inside the quote mark: .’?,”. The terminal period is mine, and outside the double quote mark because I am discussing the quotation mark as punctuation. Oh wait, I am also quoting her paper, so it should be: “ .’?,.” No wait that doesn’t make sense. Damn. And then the student quotes Yohan after the article title punctuation cascade, “There is always some aspect of nature that a theory does not fully capture.” And that is punctuated correctly.

Notice I avoided putting the student’s sentence in quotation marks in the first paragraph above because that would recast the sentence punctuation scheme of alternating double quote marks and single quote marks so that the double quote marks would become single quote marks and the single quote marks would become double quote marks, which would result in an article title in single quote marks which violates a basic punctuation rule: article titles are in double quotation marks. Editors might allow an exception to the double, single, double, single embedded punctuation rule, to allow a double quote, double quote on both ends of an article title but that would be weird: “”article title””. Note that microsoft word does not even allow for this possibility as the second double quote mark is pointed left. And where would that terminal period go? Inside the first double quote mark or the second double quote mark? Damn. This is turning into an irresistible force versus an immovable object paradox. I need to do more research on this.
Truly, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.