Comma Usage Question

Question

I have the following sentence. Is my commma usage appropriate, or should it be placed within the quotation marks?

On cultural awareness day in first grade, when asked what nationality I was, I proudly proclaimed “American”, to everyone’s surprise.

Answer 1

It should go in the quotation marks. This is a stylistic trait of English that, from my understanding, is due to the fact that when printing presses first entered popular use the . and , keys were particularly prone to breaking when they followed a " and came before a space. Regardless as to if this is just an urban legend, common convention in English is that both commas and periods go inside quotation marks almost always (with one prominent exception being certain citation styles in academic writing). I have heard that UK English is more lenient with regards to this norm than American English.

Answer 2

The writing convention in British English is to place the comma outside the quotation marks. It is not that we are more 'lenient'; it's just that we feel that such punctuation is not part of the words quoted.

Answer 3

From the content of your example sentence and from the double quotation marks that you put around the word American, I gather that you are writing for a U.S. audience and are interested in knowing the U.S. conventions for handling commas at the end of quoted language. Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage (2003) outlines the situation, with regard to both U.S. usage and British usage, in his entry on quotation marks:

In marking quotations, writers and editors of AmE and BrE have developed different conventions for quotation marks (or "inverted commas," as the British call them). In AmE, double quotation marks are used for a first quotation; single marks for a quotation within a quotation; double again for a further quotation inside that; etc.In BrE, the parcatice is exactly the reverse at each step.

With a closing quotation mark, practices vary. In AmE, it is usual to place a period or comma within the closing quotation mark, whether or not the punctuation so placed is actually a part of the quoted matter. In BrE, by contrast, the closing quotation mark comes before any punctuation marks, unless these marks form a part of the quotation itself(or what is quoted is less than a full sentence in its own right. [Examples omitted.]

Thus your example would normally be punctuated this way under U.S. style conventions:

On cultural awareness day in first grade, when asked what nationality I was, I proudly proclaimed “American,” to everyone’s surprise.

and this way under British style conventions (according to Garner):

On cultural awareness day in first grade, when asked what nationality I was, I proudly proclaimed 'American', to everyone’s surprise.