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If the title of a song ends a sentence, whether a statement or interrogative, where does the period or question mark go?

For example, is it:

The Beatles sang "She Loves You."

or

The Beatles sang "She Loves You".

Is it:

Did The Beatles sing "She Loves You?"

or

Did The Beatles sing "She Loves You"?

Barmar
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Marc
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  • There are no hard and fast rules on this. It has often been discussed before. Different institutions will follow their own codes. Personally in all the quoted cases I would put the final full stop, or question mark at the very end. – WS2 Apr 16 '16 at 19:16
  • This is a question of style, and, in particular, the "thinking" on this general topic has changed vs what it was 50 years ago (when many "authorities" went to elementary school). You kind of have to pick which style you want to go with. (Like WS2, I favor placing the punctuation outside the quotes in most cases -- it just works better, with typewritten or computer-printed text. The old standards were centered more around handwriting and old-style typesetting.) – Hot Licks Apr 16 '16 at 19:17
  • If I saw a sentence like this one, with the question mark inside the close quotation mark—and I didn't know the actual punctuation of the title being referred to—I would assume that the question mark was part of the original title. – Sven Yargs Apr 16 '16 at 19:43
  • By the way, this is a probable duplicate of Punctuation for sentence ending in quotation marks and a question mark that is part of a title, which was itself closed as a duplicate. – Sven Yargs Apr 16 '16 at 19:46
  • Unless the punctuation is part of the quotation, then I would always put it outside the punctuation marks - especially if it's other than a comma or full-stop (e.g. in your example with a "?"), because then it's more prominent and thus more likely someone would think it part of the quotation. – TrevorD Apr 16 '16 at 23:34
  • @TrevorD - It's kinda important to understand, though, that 50 years ago the advice was to always (or at least almost always) put comma or full stop inside the quotes. Hence you will see a variety of styles and may encounter contradictory "style guides". – Hot Licks Apr 17 '16 at 00:44
  • @Hot Licks Presumably, you mean that was the advice in the USA 50 years ago. I think that 50y ago in the UK, I was putting punctuation outside the quotes (but my memory is not that clear!). – TrevorD Apr 17 '16 at 11:41
  • @TrevorD - Yeah, it was a UK/US thing, as I (very vaguely) recall. – Hot Licks Apr 17 '16 at 13:41

1 Answers1

2

The punctuation is about the sentence as a whole, not the song title, therefore it ends the sentence outside of the song title.

adc
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