Period Goes Inside Or Outside Quotes

He said we need to tell the boss right away she reported that the boss was in her words miffed.

Period goes inside or outside quotes. It is an entity by itself though it is incorporated with the rest of the sentence and the sentences around it. When something is set in quotation marks it is separated. For other punctuation marks where the closing punctuation goes depends on which idea it refers to the sentence or the quote. Luckily when it comes to periods and commas the answer to whether they go inside or outside the quotation mark is much simpler.

American english is known for its exceptions to rules and there is one type of incidence where it would not be the case that periods go inside quotation marks. Thus in the following sentence the comma is placed after taught. Colons and semicolons are placed outside quotations while question marks and exclamation marks follow the logic of the sentence. In american writing commas and periods almost always go inside quotation marks.

In american english periods and commas always go inside the closing quotation mark. The period is unique among punctuation marks in that yes it always goes inside the quotation marks. This rule applies even if only one quoted word ends the sentence. If only select words or partial phrases are quoted the period should be outside the quotes.

Jazz on january 12 2010 8 18 pm. If i m quoting winston churchill i d put his direct words in quotes. If you place quotation marks around a letter or number usually the period or comma falls outside the quotes. For instance he said i m going to the mall however this is not the case for all end punctuation marks.

When a period goes inside the quotation marks it is set aside as being part of the section in the marks. And question marks and exclamation points require that you analyze the sentence and make a decision based on context. It seems to me that common sense dictates. In the us periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks.

Periods come inside with only one exception the period always comes inside closing quotation marks. For example if the sentence is a question but the words in the quote are not the question mark would go outside the quotation marks. That s always true whether the quotation appears at the beginning of the sentence in the middle of the sentence or at the very end. Semicolons colons asterisks and dashes always go outside the closing quotation mark.

In the uk the tendency is to place them outside. If you re using american english they go inside. The most common question people ask about quotation marks is whether periods and commas go inside or outside and the answer depends on where your audience lives because in american english we always put periods and commas inside quotation marks but in british english periods and commas can go inside or outside kind of like the american rules for question marks and exclamation points.