Dear Ms. R K:

You wrote:
> As a college student I am a bit confused about what I have read on your
> website, regarding quotation and period placement: My English professor –
> and apparently Lynne Truss, who wrote “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” (satire on
> punctuation) – believe that whether a period comes before, or follows a
> quotation depends on the situation. Example, in Truss’s book there are the
> following..
> 1) …”two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste”.
> 2)…”pipe down”.
> 3)”This particular comma,” Thurber explained was, “Ross’s way of giving
> the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
> Truss’s book had periods outside the quotation more than inside! HELP!
> What is the difference? Is this an “Oxford” way of doing punctuation?
> Just depends on the situation? And how can one figure it out?
>
Truss is making a point that sometimes you need to have a comma for clarity. There is no particular rule, but the comma makes things clearer. In Grammar Slammer, for example, we have a sentence that reads something like “The room was full of crying babies and mothers.” While there is no rule that there should be a comma after “babies,” inserting the comma makes it clear that only the babies were crying.

As for the periods outside the quotation marks, that is a British practice not observed in North American English. If you have Grammar Slammer Deluxe with Checkers, the grammar checker has options for both.

The only time I encountered that in the USA was a few years ago when I was doing some proofreading for a Christian web site which had many Bible quotations. The webmaster had said that he had gotten negative feedback when he included closing commas and periods inside the quotation marks when the punctuation mark was not in the Bible version quoted. I do not know if there is actually some rule about in Oxford, or wherever, but you do sometimes see periods outside quotation marks in British publications. I am not sure what the pattern is, but it may be whether or not the period or comma was in the original.

I hope this helps.