Hi all!
I hope we all know that punctuation with quotation marks is very straightforward in American English. There are very straightforward rules, which always include the word always.
You always lead with double quotes. If there is quoted material inside the double quotes, switch to single quotes.
Quotation marks do not always come in pairs, despite what Grammarly.com says. If a character speaks into a second paragraph, do not use end quotes at the end of the paragraph. Start the second paragraph with double quotes, and, whenever that character finishes speaking, show your reader when that happens by concluding with double quotes.
Commas and periods are always placed inside quotation marks. There are no exceptions. I mean none.
Semicolons and colons are always placed outside quotation marks. There are no exceptions. I mean none.
The placement of exclamation points and question marks with respect to quotation marks always depends on the context of the quote.
That’s the basic part of the quotation mark rule book. Now, here’s the tricky part. The good news is that if you know the “basic” part, you know the “tricky” part as well!
What if you have a list of items. What if one or more of these items is enclosed by quotation marks, and one or more of the items includes a question mark or exclamation point—what do you do then?
Well, when I say there are no exceptions, what does that mean? I mean there are no exceptions.
Which makes this sentence incorrect:
This week we begin a conversation about Confession—”What is it?”, “Why do we do it?”, “Do we have to do it?”.
Okay. First off, the dash is wrong. A colon introduces a list, while a comma or a dash introduces an appositive phrase. A colon (the “namely” colon) should precede this list. The list should include an “and” between the penultimate and last item. And the commas and period? The commas should be inside the quotes, and the last question mark should be the last mark of punctuation. Ditch that period. The sentence should look like this:
This week we begin a conversation about Confession: “What is it?,” “Why do we do it?,” and “Do we have to do it?”
In addition to this sentence, which features questions about Confession, it’s easy to imagine being faced with a list of newspaper or magazine articles, song titles, or, perhaps, poems—which all need quotation marks—one or more of which could have an exclamation point or question mark and so the above rule applies.
Easy!
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