It’s one of the trickiest punctuation dilemmas: when you are using direct speech, and you break what the speaker says, do you put the comma before or after the closing quotation mark?

Should it be

• ‘I went shopping’, Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’.

or

• ‘I went shopping,’ Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’.

And should it be

• ‘I went with him,’ Susan said, ‘because I wanted to check his suit wouldn’t clash with my dress’.

or

• ‘I went with him’, Susan said, ‘because I wanted to check his suit wouldn’t clash with my dress’.

Probably the main reason this is tricky is because, although there are guidelines, there is no absolute right or wrong here. That’s right: there is no single correct answer and different reference books will tell you different things. You are on your own. Don’t panic! What you should aim for is either being consistent in your use of commas in the piece of writing you are creating or, if you working in an organisation, consistency across the different publications your organisation produces, whether those are books; reports, newsletters and press releases; or social media and blog posts.

The main reference guide used by book publishers, government department and other organisation in Australia, the Style Manual, makes it sound straightforward. If the comma belongs in the sentence that is spoken, it goes inside the quotation mark; if not, it goes outside. This is generally also the British approach.

• ‘I went shopping’, Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’. (the comma goes outside the quotation mark)
• ‘I went with him,’ Susan said, ‘because I wanted to check his suit wouldn’t clash with my dress’. (the commas is inside the quotation mark)

Here, we end up with two different places for the comma because the speakers have used different structures. Tim’s remark had no commas in it; Susan’s did:

• Tim said, ‘I went shopping to buy a new suit for the wedding’.
• Susan said, ‘I went with him, because I wanted to check his suit wouldn’t clash with my dress’.

The problem with this ‘place the comma according to grammar’ approach is that consecutive sentences can have the comma appearing in different spots (one before and one after the quotation mark) and this inconsistency looks wrong, as in the pair of sentences above.

Americans and a number of Australian publishers do it differently: the comma always goes inside the quotation mark.

• ‘I went shopping,’ Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding.’
• ‘I went with him,’ Susan said, ‘because I wanted to check his suit wouldn’t clash with my dress’.

(Note that American practice would also have the full stop inside the final quotation mark, but that’s a topic for another day.)

What approach should you use? It’s up to you. If you are writing a novel or producing a report with a lot of reported speech, the American ‘always inside’ approach may be better. Of course, while that approach has the virtue of consistency, it is not necessarily grammatical. If you almost never have to report what someone says or you are quoting extensively from already published material, where you should never add even a comma to the quotation, the Style Manual approach will be grammatically fine, and in keeping with academic guidelines for quoting sources; you may just look inconsistent every now and again.

Finally, if you are introducing reported speech, a comma is the appropriate punctuation mark to use (as in all the examples above). A colon can also be used but colons tend to be used more for introducing a quotation from a book or for reproducing a dialogue in a playscript-style format.

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Photos: monkeys by Mihai Surdu and suits by fancycrave, both on Unsplash