Punctuation Rules Around Quotation Marks

To benefit from the work I put into my typography, read natively at: Punctuation Rules Around Quotation Marks.

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I recently had the worst feeling that I’d been doing punctuation near quotation marks all wrong—for like 7,000 posts—since 1999. I probably have, but I can start doing it right now if I just capture the basic rules. So I did some reading and here’s my summary.

By the way, make sure you’re using quotes correctly.

Semicolons, colons, and dashes are always outside the quotes.
Periods and commas go outside the quotation marks.
Question marks and exclamation points require you to think about context a bit. Is the question or emotion part of the quote or not? If it is, put it inside. If it’s part of the sentence that the quote is in, put them outside.


Notes


American English says you should put periods and commas inside the quotation marks, but I’ve always thought that looked horrible, and recently just learned (for this post) that the British put them outside—you know, where they belong.

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Stay curious,

Daniel