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?
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.
Punctuation goes inside quotes at the end of a sentence unless the quote has its own non-period punctuation. I call this out on every paper I grade.
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:
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:
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.
It looks so cursed
int main() { printf("Hello, World!);" return 0; }I know it, but i don’t do it.
Is this really a debate?