[QUOTE=20droger;4440431]In American Standard English (A.S.E.), the rules for quotations are as follows.
Periods and commas always go inside the quotes, whether what is quoted is a sentence, clause, phrase, or word. The one and only exception to this is if what is quoted is a sequence of specific characters and the inclusion of a period in that sequence would cause confusion, e.g., At the "C>" prompt, type "run", then press the "enter" key.
Colons and semicolons always go outside the quotes.
Exclamation points and question marks go inside the quote if they are a part of the quoted material, and outside the quotes if they are a part of the sentence as a whole, e.g., John asked, "What would you like to do next?" Did you really mean "Go away forever"?
Primary quotations are enclosed in double quotes, secondary quotation [QUOTEs within quotes] are enclosed in single quotes, tertiary quotations
Quotations extending oven more than one paragraph have an opening quote at the beginning of each paragraph, but a closing quote only at the end of the last paragraph.
Parenthetical and inset quotations are not enclosed in quotes. Parenthetical quotes are typically italicized, but may be underlined instead if italics cannot be used.
Apostrophes are a different issue entirely.
And, in A.S.E., the abbreviations for "id est" (that is) and "exempli gratia" (for [the sake of] example) require periods: viz. "i.e." not "ie", and "e.g." not "eg".
Note that the comma and period in the closing phrase of the last sentence were outside the quotes because I was quoting a specific sequence of characters and inclusion within the quote would have been confusing—the single exception to the rule!
This has already been covered in earlier posts, and the thing to remember that the rules are very different in British English. Another difference is that we do not put stops after abbreviations or sets of letters. For instance, we would put eg, ie and USA. The general rule is that full stops only go afer abbreviations if the last letter of the original word is not included in the abbreviation. As an example, we would write Dr for Doctor, but Rev. for Reverend.
