Question Mark? Quotation Marks? Which Where?

One of my readers sent a question this morning about how to use quotation marks with a question mark. Her example sentence read something like this:

I knew to combine the two words into a compound word, but could you blog about the "why" and the "when"?

She wanted to know if she had been correct in placing the question mark OUTSIDE the quotation marks. The answer is YES.

Here is a simple two-part rule for deciding when to put the question mark OUTSIDE the quotation marks and when to put it INSIDE:

PART A: If the material INSIDE the quotation marks is NOT a question, as in her example, the question mark goes OUTSIDE the quotation marks. Here are a few more examples:

Have you ever read Fitzgerald's short story, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"?

How would you define the word "defeat"?

Did you actually hear Mr. Weston say that he was "outraged"?

PART B: If the material INSIDE the quotation marks IS a question, the question mark goes INSIDE the quotation marks, as in these examples:

The witness responded with his own question, "What do you think, Mr. Prosecutor?"

Denis has written a short story titled, "What now?"

"Where's the beef?" asked Clara Peller in 1984.

BONUS POINT: The rule (at least for now) for commas and periods is even simpler. Just remember that COMMAS and PERIODS ALWAYS go inside the quotation marks--no exceptions.

There, that wasn't too complicated, was it?