![]() Go with your gut on this, and unless quotes are absolutely needed, considering omitting them.įinally, em dashes only go inside quotation marks for dialogue, to show that the speaker is abruptly cut off. Scare quotes don’t add anything in this isolated sentence except to tell us this kind of language isn’t really the narrator’s usual way of speaking (or perhaps he’s trying to use it as emphasis and it’s not really a scare quote at all). However, if I were writing this sentence, I’d throw out the quotations altogether unless it’s really important to the scene and the author’s been using scare quotes for the phrase all along. Wrong: Maybe he thinks she’s a “hot mama?” Right: Maybe he thinks she’s a “hot mama”? In the scare quote example below, the question mark goes outside the double quotes because it is not a part of the phrase “hot mama.” (However, note that the period would go inside.) This would be the same for an ending quote used for emphasis. I love “Why Boys Lie” better than any other short story! If the putting the exclamation point outside the quotation mark looks strange to you, try ending the sentence differently by either using a period or adding words. In the example below, the exclamation point goes outside the double quotes because “Why Boys Lie” is a short story in an anthology, and the exclamation point is not a part of the title. For more about single versus double quotes, read our blog post Single and Double Quotes in Text and Dialogue. ![]() On this first example, the question mark goes outside of single quotation mark because it is not part of Sally’s original comment, but it goes inside the double quotation marks because it is part of John’s comment (unless Sally was actually asking a question when she said “I hate chocolate.”). As a reminder, scare quotes are used to show when a phrase is being used in an ironic or nonstandard way-or perhaps it’s not a phrase the narrator or viewpoint character would normally use. ![]() This is true of dialogue, quoted material, or scare quotes. Question marks, exclamation points, and em dashes can go inside or outside the quotation mark, depending on whether they’re part of the quote or not. Question Marks, Exclamation Points, and Em Dashes One other exception is dialogue, where authors will always put commas inside the quotation marks.Īmerican: Yesterday I read the short story “Why Boys Lie.”īritish: Yesterday I read the short story ‘Why Boys Lie’. Note that in British English, the punctuation marks only go inside of the quotation marks if the punctuation is part of the quoted material, although many writers make an exception for periods. The Chicago Manual of Style says that “periods and commas precede closing quotation marks.” In America, commas and periods always go inside the quotation marks. If you’re like us and love to read, then click here to score tons of free and discounted ebooks.Īt Book Cave we’ve posted on dialogue tags and on whether or not to use single or double quotes, but often there is confusion about where to put punctuation in relation to the quotation marks. Connecting the RIGHT readers with the RIGHT books
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