StillStunned
Writing...
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2023
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Bringing 25+ years of experience as a professional editor (UK English) to bear to agree with EB here.Not true.
This confusion arises because people don't seem to understand the difference between dialogue and a quotation. UK and US English are the same when it comes to dialogue - the punctuation sits within the punctuation marks. "Like this?" she asked. "Like that," he replied.
When a piece of dialogue is quoted by someone else, the second speaker's punctuation goes outside the quotation marks.
For example: Did Churchill write, "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the streets, we shall never surrender!"? Note the !"? - this came up a couple of days ago, and the rules of grammar haven't changed.
The punctuation stays with the sentence it is punctuating.
Even so, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, it's a bit petty to reject a story on that ground, considering some of the atrocious quality of spelling and punctuation that gets through.