Periods and commas go inside closing quotation marks.

“Don’t compromise yourself,” said Janis Joplin. “You are all you’ve got.”

When you follow MLA style for documenting a short quotation, place the period after the parentheses with source information (see Chapter 50).

In places, de Beauvoir “sees Marxists as believing in subjectivity” (Whitmarsh 63).

For more information on using a comma with a quotation, see 39h.

Colons, semicolons, and footnote numbers go outside closing quotation marks.

I felt one emotion after finishing “Eveline”: sorrow.

Everything is dark, and “a visionary light settles in her eyes”; this vision, this light, is her salvation.

Tragedy is defined by Aristotle as “an imitation of an action that is serious and of a certain magnitude.”¹

Question marks, exclamation points, and dashes go inside if they are part of the quoted material, outside if they are not.

“Jump!” one of the firefighters shouted.

“Break a leg”—that phrase is supposed to bring good luck.