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Latest post Fri, May 8 2009 8:44 AM by Anonymous. 4 replies.
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Guest  +  37449 Wed, 14 Jul 04 09:50 PM
My job requires that I write reports on school students, which sometimes includes quotations from teachers. My question is, where do the comma's go when I have a list of quotes from different individuals (teachers), all about the same student and all within the same sentence? Perhaps I shouldn't even be using a comma? Maybe I shouldn't be using anything, I don't know? That's why I'm writing you and why you get the big bucks...right? ; )

I'll provide two examples for your consideration.

In this first example I'll put the comma's outside the quotation marks.

...and her teachers made the following comments about Mary: "She always come to class prepared", "She is a hardworking student", "Performance is improving", and "Mary is a well behaved student."...

In this second example I'll put the comma's within the quotation marks.

...and her teachers made the following comments about Mary: "She always come to class prepared," "She is a hardworking student," "Performance is improving," and "Mary is a well behaved student."...

So there you have it. Thanks for the help.
John
anon1  +  37469 Thu, 15 Jul 04 02:49 AM
I am not positive, but I would put the commas on the inside. Here are some reference articles to guide you.

Quotation Marks

Quotation Marks 2

Guide to Grammar and Style

I hope that helps.


Joined on Fri, Jul 2 2004
Senior Member 2,049
Anonymous, 1 yr 312 days ago

Nevermind where the commas go, where do the apostophes go?

Here 'commas' is a plural noun and therefore does not need an apostrophe!

Anonymous, 220 days ago
Commas almost always go inside quotation marks. 

 

In other news, apostrophes are used for possessive nouns.  "Commas" is correct.  "Comma's" is not, unless you're referring to something that belongs to that comma.

 

I realize that this post is five years too late, but for all those people who Google commas and quotations marks together, this post might help someone somehow.

Anonymous, 197 days ago
While we're on it, you should know that commas only “almost always go inside quotation marks” in America.  See: Wikipedia.org - Quotation Mark - Punctuation
Anonymous, 29 days ago
As a high school English teacher I would use a semi-colon as technically they are all separate sentences except for the "Performance is improving." The other way you could go is to say Mary's teachers said, "She is always prepared, hardworking, well-behaved, and her performance is improving."
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