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by otteromkram 973 days ago
> “why is the Django admin so ‘ugly’?”.

Not sure if English is your native language, but quotation marks usually land on the outside of any other punctuation. (Yes, it does look goofy.)

Now, the quote above is kind of special because you have a portion of it quoted within a statement. However, if you are paraphrasing all but the "ugly" part. In that case, I would drop the outer quotations marks.

> why is the Django admin so "ugly?"

Bring on the downvotes.

3 comments

A few quotes from the top results on DuckDuckGo for "quotation marks and punctuation":

Question marks are a little different. If the question mark is part of the quote, place it inside the quotation marks. If the question mark is not part of the quote, and instead the quote is part of a question, place it outside of the quotation marks. This rule also applies to exclamation points.

- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/

Place a question mark or exclamation point within closing quotation marks if the punctuation applies to the quotation itself. Place the punctuation outside the closing quotation marks if the punctuation applies to the whole sentence.

- https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/quota...

Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks. North American printing usually puts full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not.[14][15] Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

IIRC this is mostly a US/UK distinction (maybe even US/rest of world). I tend towards putting the punctuation outside the quote, especially if the original quote didn't have that punctuation.
Based on my internet experience (...) and among this particular HN audience, I'd say you're fighting an uphill battle given our collective preference for where to place and how to treat quotes.