I don’t know if it’s years of doing linguistics or quite a few fewer years of computer programming, but I’ve long since gotten into the habit of putting punctuation marks outside the quotes unless they are a part of the quotation.  This is not conventional practice, but it’s consistent and doesn’t pose a lot of problems, except that occasionally someone objects.  Of course, in my discipline and my one-time avocation, quotes enclose literal values, and this usually means not including punctuation inside the quotes.

 

Herb

 

 

I believe you will find that American printers have been putting the quotation marks OUTSIDE the period (and the comma) no matter what the quotes are marking for many, many decades.  Check out books published in this country.  British usage is different---I guess you could say more logical.  They do what we do with question marks and exclamation points.

Ed Schuster


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