Below is the sentence I am writing. I am not sure whether I should just end it with an interrogation mark within the quotes, with a period within the quotes, no in-quote punctuation except interrogation mark, or a period outside the quotation marks.
Those of you without any experience with drug or alcohol addiction are probably reading this scratching your heads thinking, “WTF is this guy talking about, if their problem is not drugs or alcohol how can they be classified as an addict or an alcoholic and why do they consistently abuse drugs or alcohol. How is that not their problem when they can't hold down a job or take their kids to school because they're always under the …
… influence?”.
… influence?”
… influence”.
… influence.”
… influence”?
Which alternative should I use?
Best Answer
My answer is not really in the other threads except partially in the comments from programmers, so here goes. First, instead of looking for a single correct way to do things, I think it's more helpful to think about what is acceptable and understandable to your audience. Your real-world experience will more effective and less confusing this way because different audiences have different expectations and conventions.
Below are a few variations that I find acceptable and understandable, with notes on the type of audience that I think they best fit. Your original paragraph was understandable and possibly good for people who like smooth-flowing text that reads a lot like speech. But I think it could also use more-informative capitalization and punctuation to clarify the structure for others. I added these changes in the first example, in case they're useful.
Also, I'm very curious why you put those first two commas there. Do you pause when you say the sentence there, or were you thinking about the sentence structurally? I'm just curious.
Edit to add examples for suspect advice. As far as I know, you cannot search for punctuation on google because they ignore it. However, there are some search engines that intentionally include punctuation, and they luckily happen to be aimed at programmers. Here are the results from a search for
?".
, which got 247 hits. Interestingly, most of them appear to be from SO (StackOverflow, a Q&A site for programmers). Some examples:For comparison, a search for
?"
gets 5,258 hits (trying to include a terminal space made no difference). However, here are some examples showing that this returns lots of what in our case are false-positives since the quote doesn't end the sentence:This last example is notable because they use the comma outside of the quotes, but the title is
Is it correct to say that “Java is platform independent but version dependent ?”
. So it's not always obvious what people are thinking.Wikipedia also notes this "logical" style, though in connection with the UK and "science and technical publications".