Punctuating with quotation marks

Emma Alpern
2 min readAug 2, 2017

Dear editors,

The rules of punctuating with quotation marks can be a little mystifying. The placement of your punctuation depends on its type, the context, and the changing of the tides (okay, not that last one). But I’m here to sort things out, below:

Periods and commas

The period and the comma always go within quotation marks.

Other punctuation:

The dash, the colon, the semicolon, the question mark, and the exclamation point go within the quotation mark when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.

Some examples:

“Home tech? How’s that going to help?” you say.

In this example, the question mark goes within the quotation marks because it is part of the quoted matter only.

Who wrote “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”?

In this example, the question mark goes outside of the quotation marks because it applies to the entire sentence, and is not a part of the title of the poem.

Bob laughed and said, “The R train is never going to come” — just as it pulled into the station.

In this example, the em dash goes outside of the quotation marks because it’s part of the entire sentence, and not what Bob said.

Punctuation for introducing quotations:

Use a comma to introduce a quotation that is a complete sentence.

Wallace said, “I spent six months in Florida and didn’t go to the beach once.”

Do not use a comma to introduce a quotation that is a partial sentence.

He said the victory put him “firmly on the road to a first-ballot nomination.”

Use a colon to introduce a long quotation. The AP Stylebook does not specify what “long” means, exactly, but generally, a quotation of more than a few lines would benefit from introduction by a colon.

Use a colon to introduce a block quote. Once again, the AP Stylebook does not specify when to make your quotation a block quote, but quotes that are longer than four or so lines are generally better in block-quote format.

Do not use quotation marks for block quotes. Since block quotes are indented, they do not require quotation marks.

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Best,

Emma

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