Quotation marks should be placed outside most punctuation. Question marks, dashes, semicolons and exclamation marks go within the quotation marks only when they apply to the quoted matter.
- Toni Morrison wrote “Beloved.”
- Who wrote “Little Women”?
- I borrowed her copy of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The close quotation mark always is placed before a colon or em dash (—):
- There are two publication dates for “In Cold Blood”: in 1965 by the New Yorker and in 1966 by Random House.
Use quotes around titles of works contained within other works, such as articles.
- “Turning Colloidal Gold into Clathrates” was published March 3 in the journal Science.