I know you all spend sleepless nights worrying about how punctuation fits with quotation marks. Does it go inside? Does it go outside? Where, oh where, does it go? Here’s the deal: Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks. Always. Did I say always? Semicolons always go outside quotation marks. Again, always. Dashes, question marks and exclamation points go inside quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only; they go outside when they apply to the whole sentence:
She asked, “Why are you so anal?”
Did you hear her say, “Stop correcting my grammar; I hate you”?
