Board Thread:The Time Lord Academy/@comment-188432-20130521190726/@comment-188432-20130522174821

Whosethebestwho wrote: Just one minor thing: the punctuation should go inside the quotation mark, no? No, not always. Ending punctuation — a period, question mark or exclamation point – only goes within the quotation mark when the quote is of a full sentence. If all you're doing is quoting a word or a sentence fragment, then the punctuation goes outside the ending quotation mark.

So, in our first example, the period is within the quotation mark. In our second, it's within the ending quotation marks, but not the interior quotation mark. And in the third, it's just fully outside the quotation mark.

These examples were sort of deliberately chosen to also show something about ending punctuation position, but the main point is just to go with double quotes on the outside and single quotes only when "quoting a quote".

Another way of thinking about it is that you put the ending punctuation within the quotes only when that punctuation applies to the sentence being quoted. A good example to add to this list, if we were stressing punctuation position, would be:
 * The Doctor asked, "What time is it?"

Note here that the statement as a whole is not a question. That's why we put the question mark inside the quotation, because the question mark only applies to the quote.