> The British style follows the same way as the American, yet only "some" American language experts advocate it?

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From what I gathered (after the meeting with the proofreaders), the American usage of punctuation and quoted materials allows question marks and exclamation points (and colons and semi-colons) outside of ending quotes:

Have you heard that song "American Pie"?
I love "American Pie"!

Periods and commas with quotes American-style are inside the closing quote:

She sang "American Pie."
She sang "American Pie," "Cherry Pie," and that "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" song.

The British usage of the last two sentences (what some American language experts advocate) would look like this:

She sang "American Pie".
She sang "American Pie", "Cherry Pie", and that "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" song.

>
> Personally, I *wish* this were the norm, but unfortunately the only rules I've ever seen from authoritative sources say it goes inside no matter what. This actually doesn't bother me with periods -- in fact it looks better inside than out for me -- but it really bothers me with question marks and, on fewer occasions, exclamation points. Such as:
>
> Did you hear that song "American Pie?"
>
> ...just looks stupid. Lately I've been wavering between writing it this way and rebelling by putting it on the outside, but to be honest, I don't like the look of it that way either.

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The Chicago Manual of Style goes on to recommend using the American style for periods and commas in conjunction with ending quotation marks.

Here's the rest of that section quoted previously:

"In defense of nearly a century and a half of the American style, however, it may be said that it seems to have been working fairly well and has not resulted in serious miscommunication. Whereas there certainly is some risk with question marks and exclamation points, there seems little likelihood that readers will be misled concerning the period or comma. There may be some risk in such specialized material as textual criticism, but in that case authors and editors may take care to avoid the danger by alternative phrasing or by employing, in this exacting field, the exacting British system. In linguistic and philosophical works, specialized terms are regularly punctuated the British way, along with the use of single quotation marks (see 6.67, 6.74). With these qualifications, the University of Chicago Press continues to recommend the American style for periods and commas."

Moral of the story: ask a simple question in the proofreader's room and you'll get out of there twenty minutes later.

-Faux "". Pas