Semicolons and Quotes

While it is true that commas are placed prior to the ending quote symbol (e.g., "5," "6," etc.) what about a phrase that ends with a semicolon and quotes. Example: She said it was "magnificent";

Does the ; go inside or outside the quote? It sure does look better on the outside. Does someone know?

In British English, we are flexible about punctuation in quotes- we can put it inside or outside according to where we feel it goes best. ;-)

I would say that if the quote is from a written source then the punctuation should be within the quote as it was in the original. Otherwise, I agree with TDOL. ;-)

Most style guides in the USA probably say you should put it on the outside, but I agree with putting it on the inside.

8)

Have a look at this:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/print/grammar/g_quote.html

I've read that the Americans put commas, full stops etc. outside quotation marks, while Brits put them inside. I've always put them inside, and I'm not even British! I'm just confused.....

Hi everyone ,

So I grabbed a couple of books just to see where the Brits and the Americans were putting their commas, full stops etc. One of them was Rice by Su Tong, translated by Howard Goldblatt.

Guess what? Rice had no punctuation (speech) marks in... at all. I had read it and never noticed. Just goes to show how complacent one can become, I must have put the speech marks in myself, without seeing them.

:shock:

John D.

Red5 said:

I would say that if the quote is from a written source then the punctuation should be within the quote as it was in the original. Otherwise, I agree with TDOL. ;-)

Click to expand...

I still say that you can be flexible here and do what suits your sentence best. ;-)

Hi lliana,

In your example the semicolon needs to be outside the quotation marks. The semicolon has no part in what she actually quoted. The semicolon will be used as the indication a short pause is to be taken before continuing to (read) the rest of the sentence.

John D.

I agree with you, John- for me, the only time the question of punctuation inside arises is when you're quoting a phrase, which may contain punctuation and then it's a question of fitting it into the sentence. ;-)

If you use Microsoft Words, the program will tell you when to use Semicolons, so i never worry about it.

Microsoft Word is far from infallible. ;-)