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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wizzer who wrote (1318)	5/25/1998 10:55:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

Wisam, re: question/exclamation marks inside/outside second quotation mark. I don't think there exists a single, universally accepted, set of rules governing punctuation in these cases. I let myself be guided by common sense (or by what I perceive as common sense, which may not be the same thing). In many cases, I would no more put a stop before the final quotation mark than I would put the period in the immediately preceding sentence before the final parenthesis. (That is to say, I would not unless I were writing for publication. Editors, as a general rule, don't like to see stops outside the final quotation mark.) Now, to your specific examples. In both examples, the quoted section is a complete sentence in itself, so it makes (common) sense to have the exclamation/question marks inside the final quotation mark. But the punctuation in your first example just looks funny. I would wriggle out of the dilemma this way: She responded -- "What in the world are you talking about?" -- in a sarcastic way. Or this way: She responded, in a sarcastic way: "What in the world are you talking about?" As for the second example, leave it alone; it's fine as it is. Look at it the common sense way: the first part of the sentence is just a lead-in to the "real" thought of the sentence, which is, of course: "Leave me out of this!" Just my opinion. jbe