Final Revision’s Blog

Correct Use of Punctuation with Quotations

 

Do you ever get stuck on what to do with commas, periods, galore when it comes to quotations? Well, here are a few notes to jot down based on the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines.

When you introduce a quote within your text¹, here are a few tips:

• If the quote is short, introduce it with a comma,
  • Noam Chomsky once told me, “Be more concise, Chris.”
• If longer or more formal, use a colon:
  • Marshall McLuhan, interviewed on the subject of politics, candidly revealed the face value power of imagery: “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.” 
• If you introduce a quote by saying that, whether, or a similar conjunction, no comma is needed.
  • In Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle complains to Henry Higgins that “I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady in a flower shop.”

If you wanted to know what to do with question marks or exclamation points, remember that “When a quotation comes at the end of a sentence and is itself a question or an exclamation, that punctuation is retained within the quotation marks, and a period is still added after the closing parentheses.”²

In the book, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker argues that the human ability of language is rooted in the evolution of our body and mind, he speculates: “At the microscopic level, what set of physical laws could cause a surface molecule guiding an axion along a thicket of glial cells to cooperate with millions of other such molecules to solder together just the kinds of circuits that would compute something as useful as language?” (374).

 

Here’s one more tip for you: at the end of a block quotation, a period finalizes the quotation but neither precedes or closes your citation that follows within parentheses.³

 

1. Chicago Manual of Style. (The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 266.

2. Ibid., 467.

3. Ibid., 467-468.

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