Where do you put those exclamation points and question marks– do they go inside or outside the quotation marks? Can you say, “We have the answer!”? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Punctuation and Quotation Marks”
Grant, remember a few weeks ago we had a caller who wanted to know whether commas should go inside or outside the quotation marks?
Yeah, I remember that.
Something about how in American English, commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks?
Right, because they’re little bitty and don’t have any body fat, and they need the warm embrace of that quotation mark.
Oh, that’s right. I mocked you for that, didn’t I?
I believe you did, as I recall.
But I wasn’t really clear about what to do about exclamation marks and question marks.
And not surprisingly, many of you wrote to point that out.
So to clarify, commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks, as I said.
But in the case of exclamation marks and question marks, you put them inside the quotation marks if they’re part of the quotation and outside of the quotation marks if they’re not.
So, for example, the exclamation mark goes inside the quotation marks if you have a sentence like, listen up, he yelled.
The exclamation part, of course, is part of what’s being quoted there.
Listen up, he yelled.
On the other hand, in the following sentence,
I wonder who said a fool and his money are soon elected.
The question mark there isn’t part of the quotation, so it goes on the outside.
So to repeat, it goes, I wonder who said, comma, quote,
A fool and his money are soon elected, close quote, question mark.
Got it.
And we should also mention that we’re talking about punctuation in prose,
Not punctuation in computer code, as some listeners wrote in about.
I do a bit of PHP and Perl coding myself, so I know what you’re talking about.
There are specific rules in programming that will trump any kind of pro style that we’re talking about here, all right?
So if you’re quoting computer code in a prose document, my advice is to set the code off by line breaks rather than with punctuation.
For all you computer programmers out there.
And hey, Grant, by the way, do you know who said a fool and his money are soon elected?
Will Rogers.
How did you know?
Did you Google that already?
Are you that fast?
I have my brain link working now.
You know, Wi-Fi directly implanted into the frontal lobe.
Oh, right, the implant.
Good, good.
Congratulations.
I’m hoping I get one of those soon.
If you have a clarification or quirky question to share, call us.
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