10 Embarrassing Writing Mistakes I See Way Too Often
2. Punctuation in and around quotation marks.
My editor here, Sherry Lamoreaux, pointed this out to me recently. She sent me an email about how she had been “drifting into inconsistency” over the placement of punctuation in and around quotes, and wanted to tighten up her usage. Ostensibly, she was sharing information, but I’ve been paranoid about making this (these?) mistakes ever since. (Editor’s note from Sherry: Me too.)
So here are the general rules:
For American English, semicolons, colons, and dashes always go outside the closing quotation mark.
He said, “You can’t have that dessert tonight” – and then he brought out the pie dish.
Periods and commas always go inside the punctuation marks.
She said, “You can’t be serious.” (Note: Do capitalize the first word in a complete quotation, no matter where it comes in the sentence.)
The Grammar Girl website advises this memory trick: “Inside the US, inside the quotation marks,” – and then gives these examples:
“Don’t underestimate me,” she said with a disarmingly friendly smile.
I can never remember how to spell “bureaucracy.”
Question marks and exclamation points vary, depending on the sentence.
If you’re using the quotes to indicate someone talking (or to quote them, of course), the terminal punctuation goes inside, as the quotation marks are indicating that everything inside them is a quotation.
Laura asked, “Who is that banging on the door?”
On the other hand, if the terminal punctuation is not part of the quotation – if it applies to the whole sentence – it goes outside the final quotation mark. Here, in this example from the American Psychological Association, the question mark applies to the sentence, not to the quoted material:
How will this study impact participants who stated at the outset, “I never remember my dreams”?
Practitioners of UK English put the quote marks inside the period or comma, and they use a single quote mark instead of the American double. (More on the UK/US differences.)
‘You Yanks punctuate your quotations strangely’, she said.