February 18, 2010: Issue 328
Are you in or out?
If the rules about placing punctuation inside or outside quotation marks seem inconsistent, that’s because they are. Here’s a breakdown.
Periods and commas go inside quotation marks:
He said he was confounded by “these arbitrary and capricious rules.”
These rules, which he calls “arbitrary and capricious,” confound him.
The exception is single quotes around cultivar names, which go inside other punctuation:
My favorite new rose this year is Rosa ‘William Strunk’.
For all other punctuation, placement of quotation marks depends on whether the punctuation applies to the quoted material only or to a larger part of the sentence:
We watched the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Have You Seen This Snail?”
Have you seen the Castle episode “The Double Down”?
TV pick: Seriously, watch that episode of Castle. A novelist-turned-detective takes exception to a murderer’s note in which you’re is misspelled. “Whoever killed her also murdered the English language,” he says.
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