Punctuation: Quotation Marks

I've been thinking long and hard about what this first writing help post should be on and I've decided to keep it simple. As we go on these will get more in depth and interesting but for today I'm going to focus on some basic punctuation rules and common mistakes involving quotation marks. Pretty simplistic, I know, but it's a start.

Closing quotation marks come after periods and commas but are used before pretty much everything else: question marks, exclamation points, colons, semicolons. The exception to this is when these end punctuations are part of the quoted material.

For example:
Which of Shakespeare's plays has the line, "Get thee to a nunnery"?
"You're late!"

When a character's speech continues for several paragraphs there is no closing punctuation at the end of the each paragraph until the final paragraph, however, each new paragraph begins with opening quotation marks.

Quoted material within a quotation is set off with single quotation marks

For example:
Sally asked, "When did Dave give you the command to 'see to the vending machine and restock it'?"

Hope this clears up a few issues. Remember that these are commonly missed things that I often see in writing and this is in no way a definitive list of quotation mark rules. I made sure to look these up in my Chicago Manual of Style for accuracy (yes I knew the rules but it never hurts to double check) and there are plenty of other quotation mark guidelines that I could mention, many of them complicated and obscure but still interesting and useful.

I hope this was beneficial to someone out there wanting some basic quotation mark rules. Let me know if there are any other topics you would like me to write about during my weekly writing helps. These will keep getting better as we go on and hopefully someday there will be something here that you will find helpful.

New Direction

While I am still running my freelance business I have decided that I also want this blog to focus on basic writing helps for any writers who might want a good information resource. I'll start posting on a weekly basis with general information for improving your writing with posts going up on Thursdays. Hopefully this will be beneficial to those of you out there wanting basic writing information. If you like what you see here please follow me and refer me to your writing friends. The first writing help post will start this Thursday. See you soon!

Read Adventure Books

I was recently asked by Dave Stone, self-published author extraordinaire, to edit his next masterpiece. He also gave me copies of the books he has written so far and I have loved reading them. They are definitely fun reads. You can check out his books and learn more about him at his website, Adventure Books for Boys and Girls.