The question mark and the exclamation point in American English punctuation are punctuated in the senses faldage shows above, which are based on the meaning of delivery. The period goes inside quotation marks as does the comma. I don't know anything at all about British punctuation rules other than rhubarb once noted that the last two of items in a series are never set off with commas from each other, whereas in American punctuation the choice is up to the writer:
British: "Apples, oranges, grapes and pickles will suffice."
American: (Either the above or...) "Apples, oranges, grapes, and pickles will suffice."
We've discussed before here how punctuation is a byproduct of the period in which you're living. Punctuation conventions do change. You really do have to train your eye to accept punctuation conventions if your mind at first insists upon reasoning out punctuation that is contrary to the convention. Recently I've been rereading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and have had to suppress the red pen urge to correct McCullers' punctuation. But now that I'm several chapters into the book, I've trained my eye to see sentences punctuated the way she wrote them. It's a fairly easy task.
My kids just went through several weeks of work on identifying comma splices (in a nutshell: commas placed where they don't belong) and fused sentences (two or more sentences strung one after the other without any punctuation). Yesterday I graded about twenty papers and was happy to see that all except four students grasped the concepts. The four who didn't still can't hear complete throughts in their heads and will find acceptable as complete sentences dependent clauses such as:
"When the computer crashed."
We have to work hard on improving reading of sentences because the state writing examiners do mark writing samples down if standard punctuation is lacking. However, I don't think these examiners would mark an essay down for placing a period outside of quotation marks. That would appear to be quibbling in my view. But for formal papers for which students had ample time and opportunity for several drafts, I would expect to find the period inside quotation marks.
