Q. I’ve been unable to find an answer to this tangled web. I have a sentence that ends with a quoted phrase, and the quoted phrase itself ends with a colon. Does the sentence still need a period, and if so, does the period go inside or outside the final quotation mark? Here is the sentence as it was submitted to me: If the inscription or mark is in the same language as the label, insert “Inscription:”.
A. If you can’t change anything in your sentence, then keep the period, after the closing quotation mark, as you’ve done above (see CMOS 7.84 for a similar exception). But if you have the option to reword, try using description instead of punctuation alone: If the inscription or mark is in the same language as the label, insert the word “Inscription” followed by a colon. Readers—not to mention text-to-speech apps—should have no trouble interpreting what that means.