Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The British rule is that commas and full stops only go inside quotes if they form a part of the material being quoted. The American rule is that they always go inside the quotes.
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No, the American rules do NOT say to put all punctuation within the quotes. punctuation only goes IN the quotes if it goes with the actual quote, otherwise it goes OUTSIDE of the marks. In the example given it wasn't even a quote, so the comma goes after the quotation marks. The quotation marks around "right" were for emphasis, I believe. It might have been
more correct to italicize "right", but this isn't a formal lesson, so I'll just say that it isn't
incorrect to use quotes.
For use in a sentence with a quote. Correct: Did he say "I'm outta here"? or He said "I'm outta here", then sat at the table for another hour.
I will say it again about ain't. It IS a proper word. In
Understanding English Grammar by Martha Kolln and Robert Funk it states on p. 9, "Written texts from the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries show that ain't was once a part of the conversational English of educated people in England and America." (period within quotes because that was the sentence) It continues on to say that sometime in the nineteenth century it fell out of use because it was stigmatized and marked speakers as uneducated and ignorant. Only because of popular use is the word less proper that it used to be.