Commas or periods outside (not "outside of") quotation marks
But this is the punctuation rule for non-American English.
Is it? I'm not American, and my punctuation goes inside my quotation marks. I had rather assumed that punctuation outside was American, but I admit that I was basing that largely on an American word-processing programme (not one of the standard ones) in which the grammar checker didn't have a British English option, and which went totally hysterical with rage when I wanted to put a full stop inside my quotation marks. It wasn't a very good programme - it use to make spelling and grammar changes even when the option was turned off.
I gained a terrifying reputation once because one of my responsibilities as the most junior member of staff was to check letters drafted by a manager and typed by secretarial staff; I used to send them back with the spelling and punctuation corrected. Since I was technical staff, not secretarial, this didn't go down well, because the secretaries were told to type what the manager had written, not what he ought to have written. I was too young to be either pragmatic (it's his name on the letter so he'll be the one who looks unprofessional, not me) or tactful. I did hear, a long time later, that I was still being used to terrify junior staff a good five years after I left, along the lines of "if you're using 'however' or 'therefore', you have to have
at least a semi-colon before it, not just a comma on each side. Why? Because if you don't, FR Hippy Chick sends your letter back."
Ah, happy days...
We haven't had 'barbeque' for 'barbecue' yet, have we? I
hate 'barbeque'. I always,
always read it the way it would be pronounced, which is bar-beck, or possibly bar-be-kay.