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Can I use a comma following a question mark (as part of a title), inside quotation marks?

It sounds like quite a complicated question, but all I want to do is correctly write the sentence:

"Leo Strauss, in his essay “What is Political Philosophy?,” takes a radically anti-historical view, contradicting Nietzsche and relegating Nietzsche's critique to the edges of meaningful discourse."

J. Taylor
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Ian O'Shaughnessy
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  • I sometimes doubly punctuate around terminal quotes, but never within. The question-mark will do double duty here: you don't need the comma. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 12 '18 at 23:55

1 Answers1

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This really is a purely stylistic question. It’s worth hanging around [writers.se] as these sorts of questions come up there occasionally.

Personally (and this is just an opinion, so kinda asking for this to be put on hold), I would italicise the title, and probably leave out both the commas and the quotation marks, but if I were writing within any kind of “house style” this is subject to change.

Ultimately the most important criteria are to (a) be understandable to your readers; and (b) where possible remain legible both to readers raised in the previous generation to yourself, and to those in the next generation.

Will Crawford
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