Saturday, July 15, 2017

punctuation - Comma use in a list of quotations

In an essay for my English class I wrote this sentence.




The decision of what I would like to do with my future has been filled with phrases like "undecided", "I don't know", and "I'm not sure yet".



The phrases weren't 100% direct quotations, they were a generalization of typical responses that I gave when asked about my future. The sentence was corrected because the commas and the period were outside the quotation marks.



After further discourse with my teacher we acknowledged the difference between actually quoting myself and just mentioning general phrases that are used often in a list. She stated that she liked my use of the quotation marks to emphasize those generic phrases.



Taking this into account what is the correct usage of commas and quotation marks in a list like this? Or are quotation marks even the right thing to use?

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