Where does the full stop go?

[poadster]

If you end a sentence with words in brackets, does the full stop go inside, or after, the brackets? I used to know all this stuff, but after 102 years I've forgotten so much.

[pamnez]

The full stop goes after the bracket. A full stop is always the last of a sentence.

[Quizmonster]

It depends. Generally outside, as Pamnez says, but if the bracketed words are a quotation and the quotation itself actually ends with a full stop, then you would put the full stop inside the brackets followed by the " to indicate the close of the quote. You would not, then, put another full stop outside the brackets to indicate the close of the sentence as a whole. One full stop always suffices.

Incidentally, if quotation marks are used at all, the closing - " - always comes after the full stop, so the full stop is not always last.

[thewillow]

Also, if the whole sentence is contained in brackets, the full stop is inside the brackets.

[becks]

Technically (i'm a geek about this by the way), you shouldn't have a sentence that ends with the use of brackets. Brackets are used a parentheses - also used like this with dashes - that are used to add something extra to the sentence. Therefore, you shouldn't need to use a brackets at the end, you could just use a semi-colon or a dash.

[Hamish]

A sentence can end in a bracket. The material (20g) was dissolved in water (100ml).

[MikeMikeMike]

That's not really a gramatically correct sentence, though. it's effectively an abbreviation of "Twenty grams of the material was dissolved in one hundred millilitres of water." (After much deliberation that full stop went inside the quotation marks, but now I have to worry about which side of the bracket to plump for at the end of this sentence.) Ah. There we go.Punctuation is just a waying of clarifying meaning - as long as you're consistent and clear it doesn't really matter. So said my English tutors at Uni a couple of years ago, anyway. Which has given me an idea for a question.