Robbery -- Punctuation

A number of you are still making a basic punctuation mistake by using a period to close a quote prior to attribution, like this:

"You suck." the class told Omar.

But in such transitions, you should use a comma to close the quote, even if the quote is the end of a sentence, like this:

"You suck," the class told Omar.

Another common goof is putting the punctuation outside the quotation marks, like this:

"You suck", the class told Omar.

What you should do is swap places between the comma and the second quotation mark, so the comma comes first.

Finally, don't forget that single quotation marks are used to denote a quote within a quote, like here:

"'You suck' and 'Your mother is a whore' is what the class told Omar," the witness told police.

Notice how in the first subquote the combination of the traditional double-quotation mark AND the single quotation mark creates a triple-mark. That may look weird, but that's okay.