Say that I’m writing about answers people have given to a survey. Does each one get its own period?
The responses included both “I decided to vote at the last minute.” and “I made my decision weeks before the election.”
or
The responses included both, “I decided to vote at the last minute” and “I made my decision weeks before the election.”
I can’t find this in my Chicago Manual of Style.
It’s the second, but let me try to dig up an official site. (Except I wouldn’t use the comma.)
I don’t have the Chicago manual right here so I don’t know if this is their style, but the way I learned it was if a quote is a complete sentence it gets its own period. And of course the period goes inside the quote.
If they are not complete sentences, each does not get a period. If one of the quotes ends the sentence, the sentence period goes inside the quote (American usage) or outside the quote (British usage).
I use the second form because it flows better. Seems to me the quote ends the sentence if there’s no ellipsis.
I’ve never been taught to use the period in a quotation encapsulated within another sentence.
For example, the rule here says:
I cannot think of a time I have ever seen a period used like that. Question marks and exclamation points, yes. But not a period.
Do it this way:
The responses included both, “I decided to vote at the last minute,” and “I made my decision weeks before the election.”
The period that was formerly at the end of the first quoted sentence is replaced by a comma. This is also true of lists of words enclosed in a single sentence.
Reference: The Gregg Reference Manual, ninth ed., by William A. Sabin, par. 247a&b
Examples: Their latest article, “Scanning the Future of E-Commerce,” will appear in next month’s issue of Inc. Magazine.
“All he would say was ‘I don’t remember,’” answered the witness.
What if the punctuation is important?
For instance:
As I was walking down the hall I saw a sign that said “Stop” another that said “Stop.” and yet another than said “Stop!”
Is that when you just throw out the sentence and do something else?
Some rules just cry out to be broken. 
One way could be this: “…another that said, “Stop.” [sic]…”
[sic] can be used when the author wants to let everyone know that what is written is not a mistake, and/or came from the original. It seems to fit in this case.
Huh, I was not aware that you could use [sic] for anything other than a mistake in the original source. I guess sometimes breaking rules is cleaner than following them, though.
Also,
That “than” really should have a t instead on an “n”…
As I was walking down the hall I saw a sign that said “Stop” another that said “Stop.” and yet another than[sic] said “Stop!”
I agree with Musicat. If it is a quote within a sentence it can’t end with a period, but it should have a comma in place of the period that would otherwise be there.
That’s a pain in the ass, as you need commas in there, too. When you run into this sort of stuff in programming books, where a period has syntactic meaning to the computer and is not just used as an end-of-sentence marker, the usual convention is to set the type in another font (usually something like Courier.) I’ve never took quotes like that to be absolutely literal. For example, in your sign, is the “S” the only capital? This is one case I would re-write and include clarifying information.
From the Gregg manual (a great desktop companion, in spiral binding so it lies flat), Par 283:
Isn’t that just confirming Jragon’s thoughts about “[sic]”?
Yes, but he was confirming mine, and I wanted a reference so no one would take me as the ultimate authority.
It’s a single sentence. Assume the quotes are each a single word:
The responses included both “Hello” and “Goodbye.”
No comma or period is necessary before the “and.”
The Gregg Manual seems to agree with you, in par. 232:
This would seem to contradict my reference to par. 247, in an earlier post. I can only explain that by noting that par 247 is illustrating quotes “with Periods and Commas,” while par 232 is directly under the “with direct quotations” section. Maybe the authors never noticed the conflict as their attention was elsewhere.
So there may be some leeway here; a comma or not. But never a period in the middle of a sentence (unless you use [sic]).
Yes, the comma doesn’t belong there. Chicago is clear that while a comma is normally used to introduce a quote, it is not used when the quote is a predicate nominative. 13th edition, 5.64
I was just surprised that I couldn’t find a reference to multiple quoting. You’d think that it would be a common situation.
It may not cover your specific situation, but does it not cover that quoted sentences do not end in a period unless they end the overarching sentence, and that they instead use a comma?
That’s what I was taught, and although I wasn’t taught the Chicago Manual of Style, what I was taught seems to almost always line up with it. In other words, I would write the following (italics used to set off the quote only):
The responses included both “I decided to vote at the last minute,” and “I made my decision weeks before the election.”
Sorry to rake up an old thread, but you link is giving me: Not Found [CFN #0005].