When creating color copies of a document, correct punctuation is critical. When you do it right no one notices, when you do it wrong it sticks out like a red wine on a white carpet. Punctuation is not glamorous and most of us stopped really thinking about it after our final grade school punctuation test many, many years ago. A quick primer on the most frequently violated punctuation rules is a good reminder for us all.
1. End questions or exclamations inside a quotationwith question marks or exclamation points and statements with periods. Your sentence should not look like this:
Jennifer said, “Run little dog run”.
Your sentence should look like this:
Jennifer said, “Run little dog run.”
Watch out and make sure punctuation marks are inside your quotations, not outside.
2. End tag lines with periods, unless they're contained within a broken quotation. Your tag line should not look like this:
Changing Lives, One Website at a Time
Your tag line should look like this:
Changing Lives, One Website at a Time.
Put a period on your tag line.
3. In a broken quotation, use a comma at the end of the break and at the end of the tag line. Resume the quote in lower case. Use the appropriate punctuation mark to close (period, question mark, exclamation point). Your broken quotation should not look like this:
Jennifer said, “The beginning of the end happens” just before “The real end comes”.
Your broken quotation should look like this:
Jennifer said, “The beginning of the end happens,” just before, “the real end comes.”
Be careful of commas in multiple section quotes.
4.Remember that periods and commas ALWAYS go inside quotation marks, but question marks and exclamation points go inside only if they're part of the quote. Your quoted questions should not look like this:
Jennifer asked, “The beginning of the end happens, when”?
Your quoted questions should look like this:
Jennifer asked, “The beginning of the end happens, when?”
Questions marks behave differently in quotations then periods.