The American convention in quotations is (typically) to place punctuation inside quoted text. But I always run into situations where the punctuation of the quote interferes with the punctuation of the sentence. How would you punctuate this (American, non technical)?
When my friends ask, "What do you want for your birthday?", I never know how to respond.
It seems odd to place the last comma outside the quote simply because of the question mark. Is that the preferred (i.e. most often accepted) standard?
Answer
The British put them outside the quotes, which seems much more logical.
The American style is to put the punctuation inside the quotes. The American version is often known as "Typesetter's Quotes".
As you can see, I go with the British version, at least in informal writing.
Interesting fact: They are called typesetter's quotes because when typesetters were laying out the typesetting blocks putting the small blocks for punctuation inside the quotes made the layout more stable and less prone to shift around. That's probably why it seems so illogical, it was done for mechanical reasons, not linguistic reasons.
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