While seated, she called her mother, tearfully complaining about being insulted and about the “unfair treatment”, exclaiming: "They insulted me. They called me a psychopath. They said I’m a ‘pest’."
Sometimes I see ‘pest’." punctuated as ‘pest.’ " .
May I know which is the correct punctuation?
Thanks.
This one. Nothing should be inside the quotes except what is actually quoted.
Shouldn’t the period come within the inverted commas?
"They insulted me. They called me a psychopath. They said I’m a ‘pest’."
The above sentence is a direct quote of what she said to her mother. The final period is part of that sentence and belongs inside the quotation marks for the sentence.
Pest is a quote within a quote. It’s a single word and not a sentence. So it would not have it’s own punctuation.
You could change it to a quoted sentence within a quoted sentence. In this case it would have two periods.
"They insulted me. They called me a psychopath. They said, “You are a pest.”."