Quotation Marks

Question

I'm an American living in the USA. Is it permissible to punctuate thusly, i.e., insert the commas and periods outside the quote marks?

• When Joe called me a "schlep", I was offended.

• The terms "prevaricate", "tergiversate", and "masticate" rhyme.

• Make sure to enter the log-in password "geeksquad 4".

• Nancy said, "I heard Lou say, 'Be careful what you wish for'." (Is the '." ending correct here?)

• Joe said, "Respect your elders". (Thinking it should be: Joe said, "Respect your elders.")

Thanks.

The guidelines for punctuation will be set forth in whichever style guide you are following. See also When should end punctuation go inside quotes? among many others. — choster, Feb 11 '14 at 14:55
Who's stopping you? Who do you need permission from? If you try to write a column for a newspaper or magazine doesn't use this style, they'll change them. But otherwise, you can use "logical" quote marks. — Peter Shor, Feb 11 '14 at 15:36

score -1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 11 '14 at 15:37

-1

According to all literary style guides, you always put punctuation marks within quotation marks. The prevalence of putting punctuation outside of quotation marks I think might be related to the rise in programming languages, which are very logic-oriented, and use strings or values inside of a pair of quotation marks (" ") to create an entry point for the programming language to use as a reference. So it makes logical sense to write your entry as:

"Sally".code{}

rather than

"Sally."code{}

This is conjecture, however; it could easily be coincidence.

answered Feb 11 '14 at 15:37

TylerH

1,330

-1. See my answer for reason. – WS2 Feb 11 '14 at 16:02
@WS2 It seems they've been altered since I went to school. – TylerH Feb 11 '14 at 16:12
I think it depends on which country you went to school in. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '14 at 16:27
@PeterShor I'm sorry if I had not allowed for that fact. So are you saying that in the OP's final example you would have put the stop inside the close quote? – WS2 Feb 11 '14 at 16:36
@PeterShor I draw my experiences as an American in the US, and shaped my response around that, too, since that's the context of the question. – TylerH Feb 11 '14 at 16:36
@WS2 regarding PeterShor's insight, from primary through post-secondary school, if I wrote those five bullet points, only bullet #4 and probably #3 would be marked correct by my professors. But we also weren't taught to add quotation marks around terms in such examples as those; we'd just write the words plainly into the sentence. Generally, only quotes deserved double quotation marks; in severe cases, we'd use ' '. – TylerH Feb 11 '14 at 16:39
I'd say the first three are "logical" punctuation, which is gaining in acceptance in the U.S. these days, although they would have been deemed wrong by the teachers when I went to school. The last two are plain wrong in the U.S.—if you quote a complete sentence, there should only be one period, and it should go inside the quotation marks. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '14 at 18:34
@PeterShor not sure what you mean by there should only be one period ...there is already only one period in the 4th and in the 5th bullet items. – TylerH Feb 11 '14 at 18:36
@Tyler: This was a proactive comment. I've seen people try to put in two periods, one because the quotation is a complete sentence, and one for the original sentence. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '14 at 18:37
@PeterShor Ah, gotcha. At any rate, did you say #4 was wrong because the period should be inside the single quotation mark as well as the double quotation mark? – TylerH Feb 11 '14 at 18:41
Yes, I think #4 is wrong because the period should be inside both quotation marks, because the interior quotation is a complete sentence. – Peter Shor Feb 11 '14 at 18:41

Quotation Marks

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