quotations - Quotes and Punctuation





Is it ever acceptable for a period to come after a quote at the end of a sentence?
How should I punctuate around quotes?



I graduated with an English Major from Radford University back in 1991, but over the years I've done a lot of technical writing as a web developer, and it does not make sense to me to put punctuation inside quoted terms. For instance...



When you find the item marked 'Lever A', please move it near 'Lever B'.



...rather than...



When you find the item marked 'Lever A,' please move it near 'Lever B.'



The reason is because I'm not quoting what someone said.


Of course, when we use double quotes or single quotes for these terms, that's just a problem with typography where we might not have italics available to us. The best way to compose this, then, would be:



When you find the item marked Lever A, please move it near Lever B.



However, sometimes when composing an email or other form of communication where italics may not necessarily be available to us, it appears that double quotes or single quotes are used and therefore we get stuck in this problem.


Is it appropriate to put common sentence structure punctuation outside quoted terms in cases where italics is not available?




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