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You wrote:
>I have often seen periods used outside of quotation marks as in the following
>example:
>
>The girl said "Arrrgh".
>
>This has appeared so often that I am now questioning my own understanding of
>puntuation rules which, as I recall, say that periods must be placed
within the
>quotation marks at the end of a sentence as in this example:
>
>The girl said "Arrgh."
>
The latter is correct.
This subject created ongoing discussion between me and my supervisor a few
months ago. He accepted the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical
Publications as gospel, except on this one. He was afraid that a user would
type *arrgh.* (including the period) if we told the user to type "arrgh."
instead of "arrgh". I think this came from his background in programming ,
in which every bit of punctuation means something. Not that it doesn't mean
anything grammatically. He also thought the period inside the quotation
marks "looked funny." I think it looks funny with the period outside the
quotation marks. But, that may be because I know what the convention is.
This seems like a case of there being a convention because either choice
might make sense, but we need to be consistent (don't we?). That's just my
opinion, I could be wrong.
