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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.
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.
Include terminal punctuation within the quotation marks only if it was present in the original material, and otherwise place it after the closing quotation mark. For the most part, this means treating periods and commas in the same way as question marks: keep them inside the quotation marks if they apply only to the quoted material and outside ...
Exclamation points (!) should usually only be used in direct quotes and titles of creative works. Bold type is reserved for certain uses. Quotation marks for emphasis of a single word or phrase are incorrect, and "scare quotes" are discouraged. Quotation marks are to show that you are using the correct word as quoted from the original source.
MLA Style Manual. 2nd ed., 3.9.7: Punctuation with Quotations. By convention, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, but a parenthetical reference should intervene between the quotation and the required punctuation . . .
Correct: Jane said that she was "very happy about it." (Again, the closing period is placed within quotation marks, no matter where it appeared in the quoted text.) Correct: Susan said, "Wait there," so they waited. (The comma after "there" is placed within the quotation marks, no matter where or whether it appeared in the original text.)
The only reason to disallow curly quotation marks is the necessity of entering them as HTML entities, a difficulty that should disappear whenever the English Wikipedia moves to Unicode. Until then, replacing all quotation characters with the proper HTML entities and asking users to type the proper HTML entities is far too much to ask.
Longer quotations may be better rendered in an indented style by starting the first line with a colon. Indented quotations do not need to be marked by quotation marks. In a quotation of multiple paragraphs not using indented style, double quotation marks belong at the beginning of each paragraph, but only at the end of the last paragraph.
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