I Don’t Usually Yell at Other Writers

But I Can’t Keep My Mouth Shut Any Longer

Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash

Something is very wrong with the following sentence. I’ve seen many like it on Medium and elsewhere on line:

It often sounds like “good vibes only” or “just be positive”.

The source of this quote isn’t important. I’m not here to shame the writer whose country of origin is not apparent, but I suspect the U. S. Perhaps he or she is British and learned different rules of punctuation and spelling.

But listen up, American writers, who either ignore or don’t know how to punctuate quotations. I’m yelling at you…

Periods and commas ALWAYS go INSIDE quotation marks.

I would imagine that Grammarly catches and corrects such mistakes, but I’m not sure. (If you know, please leave a comment; I’m curious.)

Regardless, there’s no excuse for not knowing. You can find this information online if you Google “rules of comma inside quotation,” as I just did.

Among the possibilities, these will turn up:

• How To Use Quotation Marks In A Sentence | Thesaurus.com