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If one puts a word or words in quotes in a letter or an email does the full stop come after the closing quote or before? Ta very much.
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After, usually. There are exceptions.
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Would it be correct to say that if the quote is a complete sentence in itself ends in a full stop then the quotation marks should be after the full stop? That is how I always understood things but I may be wrong.
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Mon 9 May 16 at 21:09
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I have always put the full stop after the quotation marks, simply because it looks better. Of course I may be wrong.
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CGN beat me to it,
" That is how I always understood things ".
But as per AC ...
"There are exceptions. "
Confusing isn't it ?
Our language is always evolving, but from about 10 - 15 years ago ( Bovvered ?) and continuing to date (Yawrite ?) we seem to be evolving downwards.
HJ,s website has a sticky entitled "Spelling and grammar - let's not get excited ".
I disagree, IMO spelling and grammar are how we communicate to each other, so if we can't get the basics, how can we understand, or be understood ?
I am tempted to say that your question doesn't really matter, because nowadays nobody will know if you are right or wrong, but if it is important to you you might need to do some deeper research.
(Why do i feel that i should have prefixed "CGN beat me to it," with "SO...")
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Stan's But as per AC "There are exceptions." should have a full stop at the very end if it were a "normally" constructed sentence. It is muddied by the ... and line break though.
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The use of "of" instead of "have" irritates. Although I do use it to wind up a linguistics lecturer friend...
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>> The use of "of" instead of "have" irritates. Although I do use it to wind
>> up a linguistics lecturer friend...
>>
What should wind him up more is if you point out that if language was not constantly evolving, there would be fewer jobs in linguistics!
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he's done quite well out of it.
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It seems quite straightforward to me. Every sentence has a full stop at the end (or a special stop like a question or exclamation mark). If the quotation is only a portion of a longer sentence, then that sentence ends in a stop in the normal way. It doesn't matter if the end of the quotation coincides with the end of the larger sentence - the full stop refers to the whole sentence, not the quotation, so is outside the quoted section.
But if the quotation is itself a sentence, then it will have its own full stop, obviously inside its quotation marks. If the quotation is not a sentence, then it won't have a full stop.
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So presumably in this example there should be 2 full stops, " If the quotation is not a sentence, then it won't have a full stop.".
Not the best example, but you should get my drift.
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Quite. Which is one reason that the rulle of thumbe is just put the full stop outside the quotation marks, which will be right much more often than it is wrong.
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>> Not the best example, but you should get my drift.
>>
I do, and I agree the .". can look a bit inelegant even though perhaps technically correct.
But a quotation is not normally the entire and only content of the wider sentence.
eg
As Sherlock47 has often persuasively argued, "If the quotation is not a sentence, then it won't have a full stop.".
looks a bit better, because the existence of two separate sentences is clearer.
But that's one of the nice points about English - ultimately style, elegance and clarity of meaning trump mere rules.
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Quotes - Armel Coussine
