AGLC4 Rule 1.5.6: Closing Punctuation
In a short quotation the closing punctuation goes outside the quotation marks unless the quotation is a complete sentence or the punctuation is part of its meaning, such as a question mark. A long quotation includes its closing punctuation, or ends with an ellipsis if the passage stops without proper punctuation.
AGLC4 page 20
Formatting
- Partial sentence quoted: full stop outside the closing quotation mark, footnote number after the full stop.
- Complete sentence quoted: its own punctuation stays inside the closing quotation mark and the footnote number follows the mark.
- Punctuation that carries meaning, such as a question mark, stays inside the quotation marks.
- Block quotation: keeps its own closing punctuation, or ends with an ellipsis if the passage stops mid sentence.
In the text
A Melbourne busker commented that expecting everyone to have a permit — including ‘homeless people and children and guys not making much’ — was a bit harsh: ‘Now how many of those people go in and get the $20 permit? I don’t know.’121
As Dworkin observed, ‘it is inconsistency in principle among the acts of the state personified that integrity condemns’.123
[Source: But a state does act that way when it accepts a Solomonic checkerboard solution; it is inconsistency in principle among the acts of the state personified that integrity condemns.]
It is true that ‘[o]ur lives are rich because they are complex in the layers and character of the communities we inhabit’.125
[Source: Our lives are rich because they are complex in the layers and character of the communities we inhabit.]
Windeyer J continued:
The second argument was that because the payment claims abbreviated the name of the Act [to ‘Building Construction Ind Security of Payments Act 1999’], they did not fulfil the statutory requirement to name the Act. This argument might have had some weight in 1800. In 2001, an argument based on the absence of the word ‘and’ and the letters ‘ustry’ has no merit. It should not have been put.127
Forms in the rule
Quoted from the Guide, page 20- integrity condemns’.123
- I don’t know.’121
See also
Check your footnotes against these rules
Paste your paper into the free AGLC4 checker and each footnote is graded against the Guide, with the rule it breaks. To write a citation from scratch, use the AGLC4 citation generator.
Formats, examples, passages, tables and the forms marked Not are quoted from the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (4th ed, Melbourne University Law Review Association, 2018), with the page of the Guide they appear on. Titles, summaries and explanations are our own.