Flesh

Astarion: I’ve got a fucking cultist up my arse. Want me to let him pass?

Tav, calmly: No, thank you.

I was extremely lucky in the awesome teachers I had, but experience has led me to conclude that most of the useful things in life are not taught in school (and the useful things we are taught in school get sabotaged by connecting grade and homework anxiety with them).

Then, I was probably lucky in that my schools rarely had me write fiction (I got to do that for fun and sometimes money, no grades attached) and I don't recall ever learning dialogue grammar in a classroom. If I did, I forgot it. At some point in high school I realized I was tired of guessing what to do with every sentence I wrote and looked it up. I've been using this web page as a reference for ~15 years - not for everything (thus why I've opened up my inbox to questions!) but for the basics. The lessons were repeated and emphasized by being edited and then earning my copyeditor's license and editing others.

Anyway: US vs UK punctuation around quotation marks. Come to think of it, I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. I'll offer broad observations. (My specialty is US English, but some of my clients write with UK English, so I study their punctuation rules so as not to "mis-correct" what's right in their version.)

First off, there's the obvious difference of 'UK single quotes' vs "US double quotes." And then each country uses the other style to mark off quotes within quotes. This doesn't pose much trouble so long as it's consistent within each manuscript, although when I was getting the ebook of Teleny updated, the proofreader and I needed to go very carefully to track the nested quotation marks (IIRC, some parts of the story got four deep, for ' " ' "!)

A more surprising difference, for some, is how UK English does closing punctuation vs US English (when the punctuation is not part of the quote). It might stand out most when done midsentence:

My assistant in the US said "Here's an example," as an example.

My assistant in the UK said 'Here's an example', as an example.

The UK comma goes after the last quotation mark, while the US comma goes inside it. (As for a comma before the first quotation mark, whether it's included or not for a short quotation depends on a publication's preference: check the style guide and if there is no style guide, pick one and be consistent. In my experience, most fiction uses a comma before, but in these examples it might have looked odd and having only one comma makes its change in location clearer.)

She added, 'Even in the UK, though, a closing period (or full stop) usually goes inside the quotation marks.'

There can be nuances, however, again depending on whether the ending punctuation is part of the quote or not! This applies in US English too, for that matter:

"Did he really say 'British punctuation is absurd'?"

vs "Did he really say 'How absurd is British punctuation?'"

But what US punctuation does for a quotation mark, UK English is also doing with a comma (which the US usually puts in quotation marks no matter what):

‘This sentence’, she said, ‘has a full stop but no commas.’

I dug up this Reddit thread, which confirms my own experience, which is that schools in Australia have taught students (at least until the mid-2010’s) American conventions of punctuation. The curriculum might have specified British English, but in practice, there was no penalisation or correction.

Repose en paix, dear Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026).