USAGE OF QUOTATION MARKS

                                               USAGE OF QUOTATION MARKS




Quotations can bring your writing to life―the reader imagines someone saying the words―but quotations are also vexing to format.  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.  In Medical transcription, the follows rules can be remembered with ease.....

Quotation Marks with Semicolons, Colons, and Dashes

First, let’s review the easy (but rare) stuff: semicolons, colons, and dashes always go outside quotation marks:

Bob snorted and said, “I don’t believe in zombies”―right before thirty of them emerged from the tunnel.

Her favorite song was “Gangnam Style”; she spent weeks trying to learn the dance.

She sang her favorite line from “I Don’t Wanna Stop”: “You’re either in or in the way.”

Quotation Marks with Question Marks and Exclamation Points

Stepping up the ladder of quotation-mark complexity, we find question marks and exclamation points: where they go depends on your sentence. If the question mark or exclamation point is part of your quotation, it stays inside; but if the question mark or exclamation point are not part of the quotation, they go outside the closing quotation mark.
In the next examples, the terminal punctuation is part of the quotation, so it stays inside the final quotation mark:

Reynold asked, “Can we have ice cream for dinner?”

Mom snapped and shouted, “No, we cannot have ice cream for dinner!”

On the other hand, in these examples, the terminal punctuation is not part of the quotation―it applies to the whole sentence―so it goes outside the final quotation mark:

Do you actually like “Gangnam Style”?

I can’t believe you lied to me about the ending of “The Sixth Sense”!

Quotation Marks with Commas and Periods

The most common question people ask about quotation marks is whether periods and commas go inside or outside, and the answer depends on where your audience lives because in American English we always put periods and commas inside quotation marks, but in British English periods and commas can go inside or outside (kind of like the American rules for question marks and exclamation points). I use this memory trick: Inside the US, inside the quotation marks. Here are some examples:

“Don’t underestimate me,” she said with a disarmingly friendly smile.

I can never remember how to spell “bureaucracy.”