Period Inside Or Outside Quotes Title
And question marks and exclamation points require that you analyze the sentence and make a decision based on context.
Period inside or outside quotes title. In british english the position. In journalism school i learned that periods always go inside quotes so when i see them outside of the quotes it looks very awkward. The period is unique among punctuation marks in that yes it always goes inside the quotation marks. 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.
This has always been a pet peeve. You ve got to be carefully taught wrote oscar hammerstein ii. When a period goes inside the quotation marks it is set aside as being part of the section in the 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.
The answer is that it depends upon which version of english you use. Periods come inside with only one exception the period always comes inside closing quotation marks. For instance he said i m going to the mall however this is not the case for all end punctuation marks. It is an entity by itself though it is incorporated with the rest of the sentence and the sentences around it.
See eats shoots and leaves. Well if oranges is the title of a book or something the second is correct. If i m quoting winston churchill i d put his direct words in quotes. If you re using american english they go inside.
In american english it s simple a period full stop always goes inside the quotation marks. Luckily when it comes to periods and commas the answer to whether they go inside or outside the quotation mark is much simpler. In british style spacing issues are less pronounced because it uses single quotation marks instead of double and commas and periods are placed outside the quotation marks. If you re just saying you haven t heard of the fruit you could leave out the quotes.
Semicolons colons asterisks and dashes always go outside the closing quotation mark. For other punctuation marks where the closing punctuation goes depends on which idea it refers to the sentence or the quote. In america inside the quote 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.
In american english periods and commas always go inside the closing quotation mark. When something is set in quotation marks it is separated. Vic on august 11 2009 4 28 pm. However you could also put them in to emphasize that you don t know the word at all like is this really a word in which case you would write.