The placement of question marks with quotation marks follows logic. If a question is within the quoted material, a question mark should be placed inside the quotation marks. The question Do you agree with the saying? The exclamation I hate when you say! Rule 5b. If a quoted question ends in midsentence, the question mark replaces a comma. Rule 6. Quotation marks are used for components, such as chapter titles in a book, individual episodes of a TV series, songs from a Broadway show or a music album, titles of articles or essays in print or online, and shorter works such as short stories and poems.
It is customary in American publishing to put the title of an entire composition in italics. Put the title of a short work—one that is or could be part of a larger undertaking—in quotation marks. This includes books, movies, plays, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, websites, music albums, operas, musical theater, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.
Rule 7. Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations. Note that the period goes inside both the single and double quotation marks.
Also note that, as a courtesy, there is visible space between adjacent single and double quotation marks. While American style has periods and commas going inside single and double quotation marks, question marks follow logic.
Question marks in a quotation within a quotation can get tricky. As we shall see below, the use of double quotes in fact offers several advantages, and this is the usage I recommend here.
The chief use of quotation marks is quite easy to understand: a pair of quotation marks encloses a direct quotation — that is, a repetition of someone's exact words.
Here are some examples: President Kennedy famously exclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner! Note first that what is enclosed in quotes must be the exact words of the person being quoted. Anything which is not part of those exact words must be placed outside the quotes, even if, as in the last example, this means using two sets of quotes because the quotation has been interrupted. There are three ways of fixing this.
First, drop the quotes: Thomas Edison declared that genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Second, rewrite the sentence so that you can use Edison's exact words: According to Thomas Edison, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. All three of these are perfect, since only Edison's exact words are enclosed in quotes.
Now notice something else which is very important: a quotation is set off by quotation marks and nothing else. A sentence containing a quotation is punctuated exactly like any other sentence apart from the addition of the quotation marks.
You should not insert additional punctuation marks into the sentence merely to warn the reader that a quotation is coming up: that's what the quotation marks are for. Remember, a colon can never be followed by a hyphen or a dash. Here is the sentence with proper punctuation: President Nixon declared "I am not a crook. No punctuation mark should be used if it is not necessary. On the other hand, the presence of quotation marks does not remove the necessity of using other punctuation which is required for independent reasons.
Look again at these examples: According to Thomas Edison, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Here is another example: Mae West had one golden rule for handling men: "Tell the pretty ones they're smart, and tell the smart ones they're pretty. Instead, it is doing what colons always do: it is introducing an explanation of what comes before the colon. It is merely a coincidence that what follows the colon happens to be a quotation.
This last example illustrates another point about quotations: the quotation inside the quote marks begins with a capital letter if it is a complete sentence, but not otherwise. Look once more at two versions of the Edison sentence: According to Thomas Edison, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. The first quotation is a complete sentence and therefore gets an initial capital letter ; the second is not a complete sentence and hence receives no capital. There is one situation in which the use of single quotes instead of double quotes can be rather a nuisance.
This is one reason why I personally prefer to use double quotes: Stalin announced defiantly "Hitler's invasion of Russia will be no more successful than Napoleon's was. Things can get a little complicated when you cite a quotation that has another quotation inside it.
In this rare circumstance, the rule is to set off the internal quotation with the other type of quotation marks. My answer: you should rewrite the sentence. Otherwise, you will simply lose your reader in a labyrinth of quotation marks. The following covers the basic use of quotation marks. For details and exceptions consult the separate sections of this guide. Johnson, who was working in his field that morning, said, "The alien spaceship appeared right before my own two eyes.
Although Mr. Johnson has seen odd happenings on the farm, he stated that the spaceship "certainly takes the cake" when it comes to unexplainable activity. When quoting text with a spelling or grammar error, you should transcribe the error exactly in your own text. However, also insert the term sic in italics directly after the mistake, and enclose it in brackets. Sic is from the Latin, and translates to "thus," "so," or "just as that.
Johnson says of the experience, "It's made me reconsider the existence of extraterestials [ sic ]. Indirect quotations are not exact wordings but rather rephrasings or summaries of another person's words. In this case, it is not necessary to use quotation marks.
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