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Recently, I encountered a grammar issue that I have meant to figure out for some time. Now is that time.

The English language is largely a messy tangle of inconsistent rules and exceptions to those rules. The subject of this post will highlight a portion of that messiness. When ending any written sentence, the convention is to use a one of three punctuation marks: exclamation, question, or period. That is straight-forward enough. But things get a little stickier when the end of the sentence (or, in the case of the comma, a dependent clause) also involves a quotation mark. The question is, does the punctuation mark go inside of or outside of the closing quotation mark?