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Period inside or outside the parenthesis? Login/Join
 
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Picture of Kalleh
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If you are writing a sentence, shouldn't the period be outside the parenthesis - for example: I am a professor at the university (albeit a nontenured professor). We've been told the "right" way is for it to be inside.
 
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Picture of BobHale
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It's another of those style issues that people persist in mistaking for grammar. You should use whatever the style guide for your organisation says. In personal writing I put the punctuation wherever it seems to logically belong.


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
 
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Outside seems more reasonable to me since it ends the entire thought included in the sentence.
 
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I’m with him.
 
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Picture of Kalleh
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I guess Bob's way is the most lenient, but I tend to agree with Geoff and Hab.
 
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quote:
Though not necessarily logical, the American rules for multiple punctuation with quotation marks are firmly established. (See here for a brief explanation of the British style.)

Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.

Unless they are part of the original quotation, all marks other than commas or periods are placed outside the quotation marks.

From https://www.thepunctuationguid...quotation-marks.html
 
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Picture of Kalleh
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And it's the same for parentheses?
 
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quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
And it's the same for parentheses?

I'm sorry. I answered the wrong question. You said parenthesis, but I was thinking quotation marks.

quote:
Placement of other punctuation

When a parenthetical sentence stands on its own, the closing punctuation mark for the sentence is placed inside the closing parenthesis.

Example The idea that theoretical physics can be taught without reference to complex mathematics is patently absurd. (But don’t tell that to the publishers of such mathematics-free books⁠—or the people who buy them.)

When parenthetical content occurs at the end of a larger sentence, the closing punctuation mark for the sentence is placed outside the closing parenthesis.

Example After three weeks on set, the cast was fed up with his direction (or, rather, lack of direction).

When parenthetical content occurs in the middle of a larger sentence, the surrounding punctuation should be placed outside the parentheses, exactly as it would be if the parenthetical content were not there.

Example We verified his law degree (Yale, class of 2002), but his work history remains unconfirmed.

When a complete sentence occurs in parentheses in the middle of a larger sentence, it should neither be capitalized nor end with a period⁠—though a question mark or exclamation point is acceptable.

Example We verified his law degree (none of us thought he was lying about that) but not his billion-dollar verdict against Exxon (how gullible did he think we were?).

From https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/parentheses.html
© 2020 thepunctuationguide.com

Clear as mud?
 
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Yep, that's exactly how I use them.
 
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