Direct quotations require quotation marks around the exact words spoken or quoted. Commas or periods go inside quotation marks: 'He said, "I love this book."' If the quotation is interrupted, each quoted portion gets its own quotation marks: '"I think," she said, "that we should leave."' Question marks and exclamation points go inside if they belong to the quote but outside if they belong to the entire sentence. New speakers always start on a new line in narrative fiction.
You already know from punctuation basics that marks like commas and periods signal pauses and endings, and from quotation-and-dialogue mechanics that quotation marks wrap the exact words someone spoke. The rules for how those two systems interact are what this topic is about — and nearly all of them follow one organizing principle: the punctuation that belongs to the quote stays inside; the punctuation that belongs to the surrounding sentence goes outside.
The simplest case: a comma introduces the quoted words, and the period ends inside. *She said, "We leave at dawn."* The period ends the quote, so it lives inside the closing mark. The same logic applies when the attribution follows the quote: *"We leave at dawn," she said.* Here a comma replaces the period inside the quotation marks because the sentence isn't finished yet — "she said" still needs to follow. Think of it as a swap: the quote wants a period, but since more sentence is coming, it borrows a comma instead, and the period moves to the true end of the whole sentence.
The trickiest pattern is the interrupted quotation, where an attribution tag breaks a single quoted sentence in two: *"I think," she said, "that we should leave."* The key is recognizing this as one continuous sentence split down the middle. The first fragment ends with a comma inside the quote (not a period, because the sentence isn't done), the attribution gets its own pair of commas, and the second fragment ends with the period inside. If instead the attribution separates two complete sentences, both halves get periods inside: *"We need to go. Now," she said.* Or more cleanly: *"We need to go," she said. "Now."*
For question marks and exclamation points, ownership determines placement. *Did he say, "Leave now"?* — the question belongs to the surrounding sentence, not the quote, so the mark goes outside the closing quotation mark. But *He asked, "Should we leave?"* — the question belongs to the quoted words themselves, so the mark goes inside. When both the quote and the surrounding sentence are questions, you only need one mark: *Did she ask, "Are we leaving?"* Notice no second question mark follows the closing quotation mark; one suffices. In narrative fiction, an additional convention applies: each new speaker's dialogue begins a new paragraph, which helps readers track who is talking across long exchanges without constant attribution tags.
Together these rules form a coherent system, not a list of arbitrary exceptions. Once you see them as answers to the question "who owns this mark — the quoted words or the surrounding sentence?" — the placement becomes predictable rather than memorized.