Q. I’ve got a run-in list in which one of the items is a quoted question. The author put the comma after the closing quotation mark, which looks odd, but so does no comma at all. Any suggestions? The sentence: She can ask herself, “Why?”, formulate her own response, and see which option it closely matches.
A. Put the comma inside the quotation marks. Although Chicago style doesn’t call for the comma, many of us here ignore that rule, because it so often seems wrong.