Quotation mark

In American English, the standard practice is to put the punctuation (period, comma, etc.) inside double quotes: "Hello," she said. The exception is if there is some special need to make sure that the reader not think that the punctuation was part of the original source you are quoting, then you put the punctuation outside the quotation marks

I think the British practice is just the opposite of ours. I believe the practice in the U.K. is to put punctuation outside the quotation marks: In Britain, they call quotation marks "inverted commas". (British speakers, please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.)

One frequent use of single quotes is to isolate a quote within a quote. In other words, when you are quoting source A, and source A itself is quoting source B. If I were quoting a speech by President Bush in which he quoted a phrase of Abraham Lincoln's, the whole quote would be set off in double quotes, but the quotation from Lincoln would be in single quotes within the double quotes. An imaginary example: "My fellow Americans, as Abraham Lincoln once said on a solemn occasion: 'Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers ... '."

Mike A.