Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Punctuation and Quotation Marks:
The dominant American style is to include commas and periods within
quotation marks even when that punctuation doesn't belong to the
quotation. Thus, you'd write
This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling
effect."
rather than
This is an example of what the Court has called "the chilling
effect".
The latter style isn't wrong, and some prefer it because it seems more
logical; my Oxford English Grammar says that it's the norm in British
English. But most American publishers always put the period and the
comma inside the quotation mark.
That much most people know, but quite a few editors erroneously
generalize this to semicolons and some other punctuation marks. The
rule for those punctuation marks is that they are never moved before
the quotation mark; they appear immediately before a quotation mark
only when they appear in the quoted material. Thus,
Right: This is an example of the "chilling effect"; there are
others.
Wrong: This is an example of the "chilling effect;" there are
others.
Right: Do you think this is an example of the "chilling effect"?
Right: The Court asked, "is this an example of the chilling
effect?" [The question mark is part of the quoted material.]
Wrong: Do you think this is an example of the "chilling effect?"
Remember -- only commas and periods get moved within quotation marks.
This is the American norm, and the one to which most readers' eyes are
used. Some day the error of today may become common enough that it
becomes standard usage for the future; descriptivist that I am, I
won't be able to condemn such a usage as "wrong" then. But right now,
as best I can tell, the moved semicolon/colon/question
mark/exclamation point is still a rarity, and seen as an error rather
than an alternative style. That's what the Authorities (which are a
decent guide of what current usage is) say, and it's my sense of
what's actually done by publishers. And even if you want to be a
maverick yourself, don't change the author's correct
semicolons-outside-quotes into your own idiosyncratic
semicolons-inside-quotes.
Why, by the way, were commas and periods ever moved within quotation
marks? I'm not positive, but the most plausible account that I've read
is that this just looks better in proportionally-spaced typeset fonts.
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