> > In related news, I will continue to willingly disobey current rules regarding the inclusion of punctuation in quoted words or phrases in which the punctuation is not actually a part of the quoted material.
>
> Hear, hear!
>
> In any case, I hate the stupid rule as it stands here in the States. Punctuation should go /outside/ the quotation marks unless it's part of the actual quotation.

Full agreement here. There've been a couple years so far that I've been with you in the civil disobedience. As a corollary, I don't consider quoted punctuation to affect the outside sentence, even if the effect might be to effect a hysteria in my professors. A period in the end of a quote ends the sentence in the quote, but not the sentence the quote is in.

(Examples)
"I love to go the beach!", she said.
"Really?", he said, "I prefer to defy grammar conventions.".

Maybe it's inelegant, but its logic is appealing to me. Overexplicit punctuation seems better than underpunctuation, although if we adopt that standard, then we may witness yet worse confusions. The commas in the example may be screwed up.

Ga"The commas, up which in the example may be screwed"be