My guess is that Johanna knows just as well as the rest of us that in
American PUBLICATIONS commas and periods always are supposed to go
inside quote marks, and that like many of us (me at least) she tries to
get students in the habit of always putting them inside so that other
teachers won't downgrade them for not doing so, but that in her
communique to the list she was trying to be helpful to the rest of us by
using clear, LOGICAL punctuation instead of slavishly following the
illogical, sometimes slightly confusing publishers' style sheet
conventions. (Do I correctly recall having earlier remarked on this list
that though the British deal with the matter of periods and commas with
quotes differently that we do, they are just as illogical, doing
inflexibly the opposite of what we do?)
 
Norm Carlson
Western Michigan University