Should punctuation go inside or outside quotation marks?
Punctuation should always be included inside punctuation marks if it is actually part of a direct quote. When punctuation is not included in a direct quote, it is still usually placed inside the quotation marks. (During the typeset era, periods and commas always were placed inside the quotation mark instead of outside, to protect the character. If a period were placed outside the mark, it would generally have a space character on the other side, leaving the period in a large open space. Since the typeset characters were very delicate, an “exposed” period or comma could easily be damaged, so all these punctuation marks were instead placed in the “protected” position next to the last character of the previous word.) However, when quoted material terminates a question, but the quote itself was not a question, then the question mark goes outside the quotation mark (Did my pet goat call your lawyer a “useless waste of skin”?). Should I use a single quotation mark or a double quotation mark?
