How to end a quotation

It depends

Pat Nicholson, of Falmouth, Mass., writes: “I am somewhat loose in where the period goes when ending a quote. Is it inside the quote (‘To be or not to be.’) or outside the quote (‘To be or not to be’.)? I believe it depends on the context of the sentence in which the quote is used, but I am not sure.”

Pat, several variables are involved here. First of all, your quotation is not a complete sentence, so you needn’t use a period at the end of it (or a capital letter at the beginning) at all.

Therefore, let’s use “Knowledge is power” as our example instead. I capped the initial “K” there because this quote is a complete sentence, but I didn’t end it with a period because the quote comes in the middle of my sentence rather than at the end.

Now let’s consider “Worth bearing in mind is the adage ‘Knowledge is power.’” Here the only relevant variable is whether you want to follow the rules of British or American English. I suspect you’ve read a lot of British fiction over time: Brits put the punctuation outside the close quotation mark (and the order in which they deploy single and double quote marks is the opposite of ours). We Americans put the period inside the quotation marks, as I did above.

The same difference occurs with commas in the two kinds of English: We put commas inside the quote marks; they put them outside. But we’re all on the same page when it comes to the fancier punctuation marks. Everybody puts colons and semicolons outside quotation marks: “Let’s bear in mind the adage ‘Knowledge is power’: It’s relevant to innumerable situations.” And we all place exclamation points and question marks according to whether or not they’re part of the quote. “My favorite musical is ‘Oklahoma!’” “Do you believe I just said I love ‘Oklahoma!’?”

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.