American printing convention places the period and the comma always within the quotation marks and colons and semicolons always outside of them.

Thanks, everyone. According to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style: With other punctuation Put commas and periods inside closing quotation marks; put colons and semicolons outside. Other punctuation, such as exclamation

Jingtian, The New York Times style book says: periods and commas, in American usage, always go inside the closing quotation marks, regardless of grammatical logic. Another source gives this example: ...two complete thoughts joined by

A coordinating conjunction cannot join two main clauses together with a comma. It needs to have a semicolon preceeding it or a full stop. Sorry, sometimes I write too fast for my own good; the marked out word should be conjunctive adverb.

} Are there any clues or fuzzy rules which can help recognizing a word } containing 's', 'z', 'x' and so on? You're talking about reducing the (z) sounds to written English, right? (The (s) sounds probably aren't

Sorry, but I have to ask: do you feel there's anything wrong with that "sentence" you've just posted? Michael West Melbourne, Australia Er .. not especially, no. Fire away! Joining two independent clauses with a comma is a defect

While we're on punctuation that could be debatable, what do you guys think of the semicolons in the following list? ... Al Qaeda, to rise up and strike the West and to the images of Americans killing Iraqis shown on television.' Perfect.

I should think that depends upon one's style manual, though. I learned in high school that complete sentences *should* be capitalized, but I recently read here that it is either no longer the rule and that it was an imaginary rule in the old

Skitt wrote on 30 Apr 2004: Not. I should think that depends upon one's style manual, though. I learned in high school that complete sentences *should* be capitalized, but I recently read here that it is either no longer the rule and that it

ObAUE: Not that it invalidates the marriage (although perhaps it ... a semicolon rather than a comma between "request" and "only"? Only if you think 'only' wasn't a conjunction in that sentence. I'm with Mike