Quotes Before Punctuation Or After
In the uk the tendency is to place them outside.
Quotes before punctuation or after. I m so mad she said honey collate all these papers exclamation point 2. Before or after quotes. In the us periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks. Block quotes are long quotes that are separated from the surrounding text.
Test your skills with a quiz. Choose whether the punctuation mark goes inside our outside of the quotation marks. Lately in my writing i have used dialog. Larry said how would you go about this this makes sense to me.
Colons and semicolons are placed outside quotations while question marks and exclamation marks follow the logic of the sentence. You can use a colon a comma or nothing before a quotation. If the introduction is not an independent clause and most aren t you can use a comma. The unpunctuated lead in is most commonly used with run in quotations but it is also appropriate for introducing block quotations that flow directly from the.
Remembering jane straus. Not only do you have to follow different rules depending on what other punctuation marks you mix with your quotation marks but people in different countries also follow different rules so you may see quotation marks handled differently in high quality. Quotations can bring your writing to life the reader imagines someone saying the words but quotations are also vexing to format. The answers are at the bottom.
When the quoted material flows directly from your introductory text no punctuation should be used before the quotation. The thing larry said is all wrapped up in quotes. Use a colon after an introduction that is an independent clause or if the quotation is at least one sentence. This page has examples showing the different conventions for placing punctuation inside or outside quotation marks.
Only the quoted material is a question so the question mark belongs only to the quote and must remain within the quotation marks. If the entire sentence is an exclamation but the quoted words. Usually they appear as a separate paragraph or series of paragraphs with a different font a change in the line spacing or a wider margin. In english the rules for using quotation marks with exclamation points follow the same general rules as question marks.
And although you aren t likely to use quotation marks with semicolons in case you want to impress your grammar teacher the rules are included here. If the quotation comes before he said she wrote they reported dana insisted or a similar attribution end the quoted material with a comma even if it is only one word. The entire sentence is a question so the question mark goes after the quotation marks 2 she said how many people are here unlike the previous example the entire sentence is not a question. And it s usually bound to some other part of the sentence.
In any case block quotes don t need quotation marks to set them off from the remaining text even though they are direct quotes. Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech a quotation a phrase or a word. July 07 2015 inside sometimes.