American and British English Spelling Differences - Punctuation

Punctuation

The use of quotation marks, also called inverted commas or speech marks, is complicated by the fact that there are two kinds: single quotation marks (') and double quotation marks ("). As a general rule, British usage has in the past usually preferred single quotation marks for ordinary use, but double quotation marks are now increasingly common; American usage has always preferred double quotation marks, as does Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English.

The convention used to be, and in American English still is, to put full stops (periods) and commas inside the quotation marks, irrespective of the sense. British English has moved away from this style while American English has kept it. British style now prefers to punctuate according to the sense, in which punctuation marks only appear inside quotation marks if they were there in the original. Moreover, formal British English practice requires a full stop to be put inside the quotation marks if the quoted item is a full sentence that ends where the main sentence ends, but it is common to see the stop outside the ending quotation marks.