When should end punctuation go inside quotes?


I have been/am being taught that end punctuation should always go inside quotes. For example, you are supposed to write:



Marvin thought it was "awful."



The problem is I do not see how does this make sense. Intuitively, I always wrote:



Marvin thought it was "awful".



as that makes more logical sense — you want a quote to be an exact replication of what somebody else said, so why should you add punctuation inside?


I always thought it made more sense to not touch the quote and add anything after or before if it must be added.


So, why should I put end punctuation inside quotes?



Answer



Firstly, this is only American convention — in Britain for instance you wouldn't use it (except for a few publishing houses). Secondly, this is not logical but typographical: a convention arising out of early American printers' opinion that typesetting the punctuation inside quotes looked better. This convention is slowly eroding in some areas and being replaced by the "logical" one… but it is still the predominant American convention. English is made up of a great many mere conventions and you can't really demand that it be logical.


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