Semicolons with Quotation Marks

Now that you can be confident with how semicolons work in sentences and what their functions are, there’s only one question remaining: what happens if you have both a semicolon and quotation marks?

This is important enough to look at separately from the above section. You can use colons to introduce quotations, but you can’t use semicolons for this. However, sometimes you might find that you need to use a semicolon right after a quotation, so where does it go then?

According to the rules of English grammar, semicolons, unlike commas and full stops, always go outside of the quotation marks. And, if you are quoting someone and the phrase you chose ends in a semicolon, you don’t have to put it at all. Most people would naturally put it inside the quotation marks as you might a comma, but this is incorrect. Here’s how it should look, outside the quotation marks:

• The doctor looked at the cases that were “most serious”; he ignored the cases that were mild.

Here you show that “most serious” was the quote the doctor used, but you then connect that idea to the second part of the sentence. You should always include semicolons outside of the quotation marks, and never to introduce a quote. When introducing a quote, use a colon.

More example:

• When Tyler started panicking ten minutes before the final test, Alice could only mutter, “I told you”; she knew this would start an argument but, after having spent last night hopelessly trying to make him study instead of watching TV, she couldn’t help it.