Style Guide Tip: Punctuation and Closing Quotation Marks

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One trick to help you remember where to put that pesky punctuation mark at the end of a quote is
to imagine the closing quotation marks as the roof of a small dog house. The small dogs (like
periods and commas) should go inside the dog house, but the big dogs (like semicolons, colons,
exclamation points, quotation marks, and dashes) typically should not. There are occasional
exceptions to this rule, such as when the quoted content is actually a question or exclamation, or
when a reference immediately follows the quote.

 He said to his sister, “Dinner is ready.”

 “Dinner is ready,” he said.
 Are you the one who said, “I’m ready for dinner now”?

Exceptions:
 She asked her brother, “What time will dinner be ready?”
 “Knowledge of an organization’s strengths . . . is essential to the success and sustainability of
the organization” (Baldrige, 2007, p. 41).