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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]
Quotation marks [A] are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. [3] Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
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 ...
The "logical quote style" means that punctation goes inside the quotation marks if and only if it is part of the content being quoted. In the case of a song title, if a comma is part of a song title, it goes inside the quote marks, otherwise it does not.
In the aesthetic style, the punctuation goes within the quotation marks: For example: Arthur said the situation was "deplorable." However, under both the logical and aesthetic styles, a comma goes inside quotation marks in sentences such as: "The situation is deplorable," said Arthur.
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 ...
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For example, the rule of placing punctuation inside or outside of quotation marks refers chiefly to periods and commas. The rule for question marks is this: The question mark goes inside the quote if and only if it is part of the quote. Perfectly logical, and (I believe) the same on both sides of the Atlantic, so irrelevent to this discussion.