Stewart say: > No, Josh is right. Unless there's an exception in > one of the style guides > that I'm not familiar with (I was strictly MLA and > Chicago in school > myself), all punctuation except for commas and > periods falls outside the > quotation marks. Well, she ain't MLA, but I favor the GrammarLady (www.grammarlady.com) for being practical and also more current than MLA/Chicago book o style. She agrees with Stewart also, to wit: "Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation Quotation marks. For punctuation with quoted words, follow the conventions of American printers: place the period and the comma always within the quotation marks. place the colon and semicolon always outside the quotation marks. place the dash, question mark, and exclamation mark within the quotation marks when they apply only to the quoted matter; place them outside when they apply to the whole sentence. And recently we added a fourth rule : if the construction of your sentence is such that the same punctuation would appear inside and outside the quotation marks (e.g.,…?''? or …!''!) use only the first. ...then even more recently, someone asked about xxx...?,"...xx. GL's reply was to leave out the comma since there was already a natural pause with the "?" (and besides, it looked weird)." By these reckonings, then, Josh's setting the phrases apart w/quotation marks (which I take to be an indication of irony, given Josh's general level of writerliness witnessed on audities, though I don't think rock opera needs em either) sets the idea apart from the rest of the sentence, but the sentence itself is a question warranting its own, so to speak, punctuation. Ahhh. So much better now. --kelly ===== arma non servant modum __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/