Completely agree with you, which is why I find myself tearing my hair out when a quote has punctuation inside of it that is necessary to convey the original meaning, but ALSO the outside text is being presented in a certain manner that needs punctuation to be read/understood correctly. For example, if the person who is doing the quote is yelling. Putting the exclamation point inside the quote makes it seem like the original quote was doing the yelling, but putting the quote earlier so you can put the speaker’s words last, and thus together with the exclamation point, sometimes makes the phrasing awkward.
Punctuation goes inside quotes at the end of a sentence unless the quote has its own non-period punctuation. I call this out on every paper I grade.
Completely agree with you, which is why I find myself tearing my hair out when a quote has punctuation inside of it that is necessary to convey the original meaning, but ALSO the outside text is being presented in a certain manner that needs punctuation to be read/understood correctly. For example, if the person who is doing the quote is yelling. Putting the exclamation point inside the quote makes it seem like the original quote was doing the yelling, but putting the quote earlier so you can put the speaker’s words last, and thus together with the exclamation point, sometimes makes the phrasing awkward.