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In all major forms of English, question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and any other punctuation (with the possible exceptions of periods and commas, as explained in the sections below) are placed inside or outside the closing quotation mark depending on whether they are part of the quoted material. [25]
North American printing usually puts full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not. [14] [15] Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.
Question mark: Inverted question mark, Interrobang “ ” " " ‘ ’ ' ' Quotation marks: Apostrophe, Ditto, Guillemets, Prime: Inch, Second ® Registered trademark symbol: Trademark symbol ※ Reference mark: Asterisk, Dagger: Footnote ¤ Scarab (non-Unicode name) ('Scarab' is an informal name for the generic currency sign) § Section sign ...
Further nesting (quote-within-a-quote-within-a-quote) reverts to the primary marks, and so forth. Question marks, exclamation points, semicolons and colons are placed inside the quotation marks when they apply only to the quoted material; if they syntactically apply to the sentence containing or introducing the material, they are placed outside ...
Not always true. In fact, the example you give earlier for "logical" style (putting the exclamation mark inside of the quotation mark only if it relates to the item inside the quotes) is the standard for North America too for things like exclamation marks and, especially, question marks.
to express "It may be over"; the question mark here adds a nuance of uncertainty to the sentence rather than turning it into a question. [26] Chinese also has a spoken indicator of questions, which is 吗 (ma). However, the question mark should always be used after 吗 when asking questions. [27]
In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside the closing quotation mark regardless.
When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within the quotation marks. This is the British style. This sound appealing; even as an American, I have never quite accepted the idea that punctuation should go inside the quotes as often as style ...