: Re: Properly punctuate a quote I am trying to learn to properly punctuate a quote, for example If I have I said "Let us go" and we left. Do I put a comma before or after the quote?

@Karen856

It's not a simple question, and it depends where you are, whether it's direct speech or attribution, and whether all or part of what was said is being quoted (like this from a UK source).

Punctuation outside the quotation marks in dialogue looks weird to a British audience - it's something others say we do, like having bad teeth or talking like Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins", but with less justification.

It gets worse, though, and the phase you've picked demonstrates this :

I said "Let us go," and we left. [I said "Shall we depart?" and we followed that suggestion.]

I said "Let us go", and we left. [I said "Release us", they did, and we departed.]

Both seem to work depending on the context, and the second fits the idea that what's inside the quotation marks is not a complete account - there will have been dialogue or at least a physical response from our captors, so this agrees with The Guardian on where to put the comma.

There's significant UK bias in my answer, so I'm hoping others will add perspectives from other English speaking (and writing) lands.

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