Placement with other punctuation : A period or comma always go inside closing quotation marks. A dash, semicolon, question mark and exclamation point go inside closing quotation marks when the punctuation applies to the quotation itself and outside when it applies to the whole sentence. Skip to main content.
Punctuation: Quotation Marks. If there are quotation marks within a quote of less than forty words, change those to single quotation marks. Referring to a letter, word, phrase, or sentence as a linguistic example of itself: the letter "p"; the singular "they"; he wrote over and over "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The study produced what I will refer to as "alpha-particles. Within double quotation marks, c onvert double quotation marks to single quotation marks: She told me, "It seems like everyone is always looking down at their phones, but, as Plato said, 'It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other' ca.
The meaning of a number is clear: Alex wears the number 13 jersey. Semicolon Use to separate lists containing commas: The American flag is red, white, and blue; rectangular, flat, and thin; and slack, waving, or fluttering. You should not insert additional punctuation marks into the sentence merely to warn the reader that a quotation is coming up: that's what the quotation marks are for.
Remember, a colon can never be followed by a hyphen or a dash. Here is the sentence with proper punctuation: President Nixon declared "I am not a crook. No punctuation mark should be used if it is not necessary. On the other hand, the presence of quotation marks does not remove the necessity of using other punctuation which is required for independent reasons.
Look again at these examples: According to Thomas Edison, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Here is another example: Mae West had one golden rule for handling men: "Tell the pretty ones they're smart, and tell the smart ones they're pretty. Instead, it is doing what colons always do: it is introducing an explanation of what comes before the colon.
It is merely a coincidence that what follows the colon happens to be a quotation. This last example illustrates another point about quotations: the quotation inside the quote marks begins with a capital letter if it is a complete sentence, but not otherwise.
Look once more at two versions of the Edison sentence: According to Thomas Edison, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. The first quotation is a complete sentence and therefore gets an initial capital letter ; the second is not a complete sentence and hence receives no capital.
There is one situation in which the use of single quotes instead of double quotes can be rather a nuisance. This is one reason why I personally prefer to use double quotes: Stalin announced defiantly "Hitler's invasion of Russia will be no more successful than Napoleon's was. Things can get a little complicated when you cite a quotation that has another quotation inside it.
In this rare circumstance, the rule is to set off the internal quotation with the other type of quotation marks. My answer: you should rewrite the sentence. Otherwise, you will simply lose your reader in a labyrinth of quotation marks. If you have a long quotation which you want to display indented in the middle of the page, you do not need to place quotes around it, though you should make sure that you identify it explicitly as a quotation in your main text. Here is an example cited from G.
Carey's famous book on punctuation, Mind the Stop Carey : I should define punctuation as being governed two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste. In our last example, you can see that there's a comma between the words anymore and said. The comma is there to separate the quote from the tag —the phrase that tells us who's being quoted. In that example, said Dorothy is the tag. Because the quote is before the tag in this case, we put the comma before the tag too.
Let's take a look at another example:. Remember how we said the comma belongs between the quote and the tag? This tag has a direct quote on both sides, so it has commas on both sides too.
What about this sentence? As you probably guessed, because the quote comes before the tag in the sentence the comma does too. But what about a sentence like this? This sentence has a tag in the middle of it. But the first part of the quote has a question mark at the end, so we can't put a comma there. When a quotation ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you don't need a comma before the tag — just put a period after the tag, like we did in this example.
Sometimes people have trouble knowing where to put punctuation marks if they're next to quotation marks. For instance, can you tell which of these sentences is correct? If you chose the blue sentence, you're right.
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