I’ve always found this punctuation rule a little strange: in American English, the period goes inside the quotation marks. Like: > She shouted, “Hey.” I don’t think this convention is logically sound. Maybe that doesn't matter. I don’t know. But allow me to make my case. A sentence ends when all of its information has been delivered, and a period is supposed to mark that end. But the end of a sentence can’t arrive when there’s still another piece of information coming—like the closing quotation mark. That mark carries meaning. Without it, the reader wouldn’t know the quote was over. So if the period comes before that, it’s stepping in early. The sentence is saying “Sentence over!” and then giving you one more piece of itself. That’s logically inconsistent. Sometimes what you’re quoting is a full sentence, and sometimes it’s not. I think you should punctuate accordingly. > She shouted, “Hey". “Hey” isn’t a sentence. It doesn’t need a period. You should mark the end of your sentence after all pieces of information. In cases where the quoted material is a full sentence, and that quote is the final part of the larger sentence, the period really belongs in both places—inside the quote to complete the quoted sentence, and outside the quote to properly mark the end of the full sentence. She said, "I don't want you to go.". That feels logically consistent to me, even if it breaks every style guide. Am I alone in this?
