Asklemmy

Completely agree with you, which is why I find myself tearing my hair out when a quote has punctuation inside of it that is necessary to convey the original meaning, but ALSO the outside text is being presented in a certain manner that needs punctuation to be read/understood correctly. For example, if the person who is doing the quote is yelling. Putting the exclamation point inside the quote makes it seem like the original quote was doing the yelling, but putting the quote earlier so you can put the speaker's words last, and thus together with the exclamation point, sometimes makes the phrasing awkward.

Allowing the quote to be affected by the punctuation around it seems to undermine the "verbatim"-ness of a quote. If the period goes outside of the quote, then the quote is always a discrete unit of text that can be moved around the sentence as needed.

Example:

He said, "It's fine".

"It's fine", he said.

I would accept always including the period inside the quote for that case, but it causes other problems. If you put the period inside the quote, how do you indicate a quote that must end in a period, but does not end the sentence?

Example:

The spec sheet read "88 m.p.h." on the back.

Edit: It's been two days, and no reply. I think they might have actually died on this hill.

It looks so cursed

int main() {
   printf("Hello, World!);"
   return 0;
}

Is this really a debate?

This drove me nuts back in high school. Somehow the yearbook comittee never got it right. Senior year I went through with red pen and circled all the punctuation mistakes for fun.

I know it, but i don't do it.