Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Punctuations for quotes in a list





"make a monkey of someone", " don't monkey with that lock!", and "where have you been, you little monkey!" are examples of sentences where monkey have different meaning.




Should the comma be placed inside the quotes, or outside?



To make it clearer, I am referring to placing the comma when the quoted sentence already has a punctuation like the exclamation mark, or the question mark.


Answer



American style is to place the comma inside the quotes. This is universally the case in publishing and accords with all style guides (Chicago, AP, NYT, etc.). The only exception is is in academic works, particularly philosophy texts, where a word is being specially defined and offset with single quotes. That exception, however, is not widespread and some houses, such as Oxford University Press, use the single quote as closing punctuation.



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