In English we don’t write commas or periods outside the quotes. The proper way is to write them inside the quotation.
- “defect,” a flaw, an error.
- about giving a dam.”
Don’t get me started about “for purposes TBD later.”
The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."
your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:
>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".
But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.
Your point that this is a generational change is interesting and reminds me of boomers who still write double space after a period.
That’s only the case for American English. British English places periods and commas outside the quotes, unless part of a literal quotation.
Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal". I like it! It should be the name of a website, defectolegal.com, for purposes TBD later.
The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
"Defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect", a flaw, an error.
Don't get me started about "giving a dam".