For years now I've written in quiet rebellion against standard English punctuation and I'm wondering whether it's time to start conforming.
The point in question is whether punctuation should fall inside quotation marks if the punctuation itself is not part of what is being quoted.
The rule as I learned it in school is that periods and commas that follow a quotation should always be placed inside the adjacent quotation marks. Only in the case of a question mark can you put it outside the quotes, in order to make it clear whether the quote is itself a question:
She called him a "fool," a "buffoon," and a "cretin."
Were her exact words, "You are a buffoon"?
No, actually she asked him, "What are you, a buffoon?"
Since I learned to program computers at an impressionable age I've always been offended at the idea of putting anything inside quotation markes that doesn't logically belong there. So in any context where I wan't being graded on orthography I've preferred to treat all punctuation like the question mark and write:
She called him a "fool", a "buffoon", and a "cretin".
So, now that I'm doing more formal writing, I'm wondering: does my idiosyncratic method make me look like a fool, a buffoon and a cretin?