Process Beginnings Endings  Persuasion Paragraphs Tone Flow Parallelism Inflation Conciseness Verbs Clutter Conventions	13.3.9 Use punctuation appropriately in relation to quotation marks
	Typographical custom dictates that at the end of a quotation, a period or comma goes inside the quotes; a colon or semicolon goes outside the quotes; a question mark or exclamation point goes where it logically belongs. All of these examples are correct: Jim said, ''Get on over here.'' I asked him what exactly he meant by ''nitpicking.'' Though he was in a ''dither,'' he made good sense. He was in a ''dither''; so was I. Was he in a ''dither''? He said, ''Why do I get into these problems?'' The one plausible exception to this rule involves giving keyboard instructions. In that case, I would put the punctuation where it logically belongs. If you put the period or comma inside the quotes here, your keypuncher might type those marks as part of the command.
	Courtesy of John Mercer Associates, www.MercerWriting.com ==>Guidelines ==>Conventions ==>Problems