A few years ago while copy editing an article, I was shocked to see something like this: “I lecture my sales staff about what I call ‘me syndrome,’” Jones said. What shocked me was the punctuation.

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll ...

It’s been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks, notes Ben Yagoda, “but in copy-editor-free zones — the Web and emails, student papers, business ...

Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...