Terry, when miss or ill is by itself it's pronounced properly, when followed
by a period it has been assumed that those words are being used as
abbreviations for state names but in most cases where the word occurs
followed by punctuation abbreviations are not what is being intended and
it's very distracting to be reading something and have the vn say something
like "He wasn't in school because he was illinois." if there was no
punctuation after the word it would have just read the word as ill. The same
with miss and mississippi.
Tessa
