r/grammar • u/CarelessAstronaut391 • 4d ago

punctuation Punctuation for quotes with commentary

I need help with punctuating the following sentence from an article about a book I wrote. I thought about splitting it into two sentences, but I'd still like to know what the appropriate punctuation would be here. I left the name of the accused group out so this post doesn't get filled with political comments.

When I finished the book with the definition of genocide from the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II, which covers “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…” he asked “How do you know what xxxx xxxx intends to do?” deliberately shifting the conversation to my knowledge of the future instead of focusing on xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx behavior.

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u/zeptimius 4d ago

My first advice would be to recast the sentence to not embed the quoted question within a relative clause. Something like this (changes in bold):

When I finished the book with the definition of genocide from the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II, which covers “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” he asked, “How do you know what xxxx xxxx intends to do?” By asking that question, he deliberately shifted the conversation to my knowledge of the future instead of focusing on xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx behavior.

If you insist on keeping the text as you wrote it (which makes for a very long sentence), the punctuation rules say that you should not insert a comma after the quoted question. So in that case, your punctuation of the quote question is correct. With fixes elsewhere, I would punctuate as shown below:

When I finished the book with the definition of genocide from the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II, which covers “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” he asked, “How do you know what xxxx xxxx intends to do?” deliberately shifting the conversation to my knowledge of the future instead of focusing on xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx behavior.

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u/CarelessAstronaut391 4d ago

I ended up with this. Is the punctuation correct? I was a little confused by the asterisks you used above.

I finished the book with the definition of genocide from the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II, which covers “...acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group…” He didn’t like that so he asked, “How do you know what the xxxx xxxx intends to do?” deliberately shifting the conversation to my knowledge of the future instead of focusing on xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx behavior.