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This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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Latest Posts : Punctuation and Mechanics
I know that commas and periods go inside quotation marks, but I can’t help breaking this rule. Firstly, they look better outside. Secondly it doesn’t make sense, at least to me. For instance:
From the crowd I heard, “apple!,” “orange!,” “grape!,” and “banana!.”
For each expression, the exclamation mark makes sense to be within the double-quotes because it functionally belongs to each person who is uttering it, but the commas do not. What the first person said is: “apple!” The comma has nothing to do with him. That is, he is not the one who is itemizing various fruits. As far as he is concerned, apple was the only thing he needed to express. Functionally speaking the comma belongs to the sentence, not to the expression. For me, it looks much better to write:
From the crowd I heard, “apple!”, “orange!”, “grape!”, and “banana!”.
This makes it clear what I am itemizing. Here is one quote, here is another, and so on..
Do you need spaces before and after em dash? Blah blah—blah blah. Or Blah blah — blah blah.
Every native speaker has a different opinion about where the commas go when you list more than 2 words. Which is correct? “apples, oranges and grapes.” or “apples, oranges, and grapes”
