I was reading a book last night when suddenly, I came upon very strange looking punctuation. The book is horribly written trash, the apparent standard for the big presses these days, but it felt well edited. Or so I thought.
Without giving away the book, here is basically what they wrote: "Blah, blah, blah, ghost and shit, OMG teen drama, blah, blah"."
That's right - they have 3 punctuation marks... In a book that is consistently ranked in the Amazon top 1,000. Next time someone berates small press for poor editing, I really want to hand them this garbage and see what they think.
Anyways, what's the actual rule for quotations and punctuation? The error above isn't the only one I've seen. Many authors (and presumably editors) are baffled by the required location of punctuation involving quotes.
Here it is: unless you have a rather uncommon sentence structure, punctuation goes inside the quotes.
Looking for more specifics? Here is a website that beautifully explains the rules.
And of course, since the Brits insist on doing everything their own way, England basically throws all expected grammatical conventions out the window.