A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007

Order of punctuation marks
Spelling
Part III. Style 20 spelling

The most likely cases of adjacent marks of punctuation involve terminal punctuation marks with quotation marks, parentheses, or brackets. American usage follows a few reliable guidelines for ordering multiple marks.

WITH QUOTATION MARKS. A final comma or period nearly always precedes a closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the quoted matter or not.

In support of the effort “to bring justice to our people,” she joined the strike.

She made the argument in an article titled “On ’Managing Public Debt.’;”

One exception: when single quotation marks are used to set off special terms in certain fields, such as linguistics, philosophy, and theology (see 21.10), put a period or comma after the closing quotation mark.

Some contemporary theologians, who favored ’religionless Christianity’, were proclaiming the ’death of God’.

Question marks and exclamation points precede a closing quotation mark if they are part of the quoted matter. They follow the quotation mark if they apply to the entire sentence in which the quotation appears.

Her poem is titled “What Did the Crow Know?”

Do we accept Jefferson's concept of “a natural aristocracy”?

Semicolons and colons always follow quotation marks. If the quotation ends with a semicolon or a colon, change it to a period or a comma to fit the structure of the main sentence (see 25.3.1).

He claimed that “every choice reflects an attitude toward Everyman”; his speech then enlarged on the point in a telling way.

The Emergency Center is “almost its own city”: it has its own services and governance.

WITH PARENTHESES AND BRACKETS. When you enclose a complete sentence in parentheses, put the terminal period (or other terminal punctuation mark) for that sentence before the last parenthesis. However, put the period outside when material in parentheses, even a grammatically complete sentence, is included within another sentence. The same principles apply to material in brackets.

We have noted similar motifs in Japan. (They can also be found in Korean folktales.)

Use periods in all these situations (your readers will expect them).

Myths have been accepted as allegorically true (by the Stoics) and as priestly lies (by the Enlightenment).

(The director promised completion “on time and under budget” [italics mine].)

For terminal punctuation with citations given parenthetically, see 25.2.

1. There is a second type of dash, called an en dash (a dash that used to be exactly the width of the capital letter n), that is used in published works to mean “through,” usually in connection with numbers or dates (1998—2008). It can also be used in other contexts, as discussed in 6.83—86 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (2003). If your local guidelines require it, this character is available in most word processors; otherwise use a hyphen in these contexts. Note that this book uses en dashes where they are appropriate, as in the preceding reference to the Chicago Manual.