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Is it ever acceptable for a period to come after a quote at the end of a sentence?
Should one stick to American style of placing punctation marks within quotes if one uses the american spelling of words?

Original question title: What is the correct syntax to use: “blah blah.” or “blah blah”.?

I wonder why in most of the books I've read, the full stop . is written before the double quotation mark "..." if the sentence is ended with a say or something that is surrounded by 2 double quotation marks "..."! Is it the right syntax? Shouldn't the full stop . be the last "character" in the sentence?

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Also Is it ever acceptable for a period to come after a quote at the end of a sentence? (which is probably better, but I didn't find it first time around) – FumbleFingers Jan 15 '12 at 0:18
I hope you don't mind that I edited your question title. I'm sure it will be closed momentarily anyway, because this is a bit of a hoary old chestnut. But I changed the title hoping to make it easier for future visitors to find an existing answer - yours can be the "Clapham Junction" question that they all go through to find the answer! – FumbleFingers Jan 15 '12 at 0:23
@FumbleFingers Yes, I also think the second one is more appropriate. :) – Alenanno Jan 15 '12 at 0:24
@Alenanno: The main difference is my second link there is the oldest such question on ELU, and as such it contains several conflicting positions - plus the top-voted answer doesn't come first, because it's not the accepted one. Barrie's answer on my first link has much to commend it, IMHO - it's really just a link to a comprehensive summary of the issues by Larry Trask, formerly Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, England. Apart from anything else, I'm a Sussex man myself (Trask himself was American, though). – FumbleFingers Jan 15 '12 at 0:47

marked as duplicate by FumbleFingers, Mahnax, Alenanno, Gnawme, jwpat7 Jan 15 '12 at 0:45

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