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In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, [1] [2] speech marks, [3] quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name.
(The very quote is being questioned, so the question mark belongs outside; any punctuation at the end of the original quote is omitted.) When a quoted sentence fragment ends in a period, some judgment is required: if the fragment communicates a complete sentence, the period can be placed inside.
The 7th Edition, published in 2007, stipulates that the use of periods, question marks, and exclamation points as "terminal punctuation" to end a sentence should be followed by a single space. [28] Until the early 2000s, the Modern Language Association (MLA) left room for its adherents to single or double sentence space. In 2008, it modified ...
For example, "Stop!" has the punctuation inside the quotation marks because the word "stop" is said with emphasis. However, when using "scare quotes", the comma goes outside. Other examples: Arthur said the situation was "deplorable". (The full stop (period) is not part of the quotation.)
If the quotation is a single word or a sentence fragment, place the terminal punctuation outside the closing quotation mark. When quoting a full sentence, the end of which coincides with the end of the sentence containing it, place terminal punctuation inside the closing quotation mark. Miller wanted, he said, "to create something timeless".
By convention, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, but a parenthetical reference should intervene between the quotation and the required punctuation . . . All other punctuation marks—such as semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points—go outside a closing quotation mark, except when they are part of the ...
Hogwash. In the U.S., most punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. If you can't figure out that a comma is used in a series, then it wouldn't matter if it was inside or outside the quotes. If you can't figure out that the sentence ends in a period, then the same.
In the British system, which is also called "logical quotation", [42] full stops and commas are placed according to grammatical sense: [41] [43] This means that when they are part of the quoted material, they should be placed inside, and otherwise should be outside. For example, they are placed outside in the cases of words-as-words, titles of ...