The practice in the United States and Canada is to place full stops and commas inside quotation marks in most styles.^[35] In the British system, which is also called "logical quotation",^[36] full stops and commas are placed according to grammatical sense:^[35][37] This means that when they are part of the quoted material, they should be placed inside, and otherwise should be outside. For example, they are placed outside in the cases of words-as-words, titles of short-form works, and quoted sentence fragments.


There is some national crossover. The American style is common in British fiction writing.^[38] The British style is sometimes used in American English. For example, The Chicago Manual of Style recommends it for fields where comma placement could affect the meaning of the quoted material, such as linguistics and textual criticism.^[39][40]


The use of placement according to logical or grammatical sense, or "logical convention", now the more common practice in regions other than North America,^[41] was advocated in the influential book The King's English by Fowler and Fowler, published in 1906. Prior to the influence of this work, the typesetter's or printer's style, or "closed convention", now also called American style, was common throughout the world.