"Commas and Periods — Inside Closing Quotation Marks or Outside Them?"

Eugene Volokh says the British rule makes more sense.

I absolutely agree.

Alas, though, Volokh concludes:

Certainly the American rule, much as it offends some people’s sense of linguistic logic, is correct in American usage, because it is usage and not logic that defines linguistic correctness.

Comments

[JorgXMcKie]

I had some real arguments about this when filing my dissertation. I had to use the American style. I also was forced to hyphenate high school when it was used as an adjective phrase.

OTOH, I won on all my comma placements, capitalizing Ancient Greece [on the point that it was not just old but a specific historic period] and a whole buncha specialized stats usages. [Grad schools should really not assign people with BAs in, say, Romantic Poetry, to read statistical dissertations.]

[CWard]

I never understood why punctuation went inside the quotation marks when it wasn't part of the quote. I sure wish I could find my high school Composition teacher!

[Norman]

I love the post you link to, including and perhaps especially the conclusion. If pure logic governed the use of language, we would all be forced by the language police to speak and write exclusively in Esperanto. Language is defined by its usage. What we consider aesthetically pleasing or logical still matters, but it's not the same thing as "correct." (or, for you Britons out there, "correct".)

[Dave Tufte]

For 5 years or so, I've been trying to put the period outside the quotation marks.

The part of me my wife calls vulcan wants says I should do it that way.

But ... 4 decades of writing means that it never looks right after I'm done with it.