A question about punctuation..?

Question

1.. Does a full stop (period) come inside or outside parenthesis?

2.. Does a question mark come inside or outside exclamation marks?

3.. Does a full stop come inside or out side exclamation marks?

4. Can you correctly punctuate this sentence for me?

Who ? she asked, was that person I saw you with?

Any other tips would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not certain I understand your question, or you are using the right terms when you say parenthesis () and exclamation marks !! maybe you meant quotation marks ""

For your three questions:

1. If you really meant parenthesis not quotation marks, then I could be either inside or outside depending upon the usage, for example:

This is an example (dog).

This example contains sentences (This is sentence one.  This is sentence two.).

I am not sure that the second example would be consider perfectly proper English though, but I think if you had some reason to have sentences within parenthesis, then you need ot end each sentence with a full stop.  You also need to end the overall sentence with a full stop too.

2. and 3. I'm pretty sure you didn't really mean exclamation marks which wouldn't make sense (and not proper usage) like:

?! or !? or .! or !.

Assuming you meant quotation marks, then the answer is that the leading punctuation (usually a comma as in your example below) should be outside or before, but trailing punctuation should be inside the quotation marks.

4. "Who," she asked, "was that person I saw you with?"

I changed the first question mark to a comma, because it is really just the beginning of the entire sentence that "she asked."  Consider that you couldn't or shouldn't say:

"Who?"

"was that person I saw you with?"

(they aren't separate questions)

Answer 2

try grammargirl.com  

Answer 3

1. The full stop goes outside (in most cases).  However, if your parentheses contain more than one complete sentence (like this, for example. This is two), it goes inside.

2. I believe either way is acceptable

3. You should never have both a full stop and an exclamation mark ending a sentence - use one or the other.

4. "Who," she asked, "was that person I saw you with?"

Answer 4

1. Full stop comes outside of parenthesis

2. Do you mean quotation marks? A question mark goes inside quotation marks

3. A full stop goes inside quotation marks too (idk what you mean by exclamation marks).

4. "Who," she asked, "was the person I saw you with?"