Periods and Commas After Quotation Marks

Amateur editing has lots of tells. But in American English, none is more reliable than a comma or period after a closing quotation mark. Here's and example of the error.

John can't spell the word "embarrass", and he also has trouble with "supersede".

In AP, Chicago, New York Times, L.A. Times, MLA, APA and every other style in the country, both the comma and the period should come before the closing quotation mark, not after. No one other than professional editors seems to know that.

Exclamation points and question marks, however, follow different rules. An exclamation point or question mark could go before or after a closing quotation mark, depending on whether it modifies the whole sentence or only the quoted portion.

Alfred E. Neuman's catch phrase is "What, me worry?"

Is Bart Simpson's catch phrase "Ay, caramba"?

As you've probably noticed, though, amateur editing is winning. Thanks to the Internet, its far more prevalent than the professional kind. It's probably just a matter of time until the popular way becomes the right way. And Wikipedia is hastening the process because its style is to treat periods and commas the same way we treat question marks and exclamation points.

But until the rule books change, one of the best ways to set your writing head and shoulders above the masses' is by never putting a comma or period after a closing quotation mark.

Tags: COPY EDITING, PUNCTUATION

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2015 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.