I cannot abide the rule that states that periods always go inside the closing quotation mark. It just doesn’t look right to me sometimes, and that nags at me. The quotation is a discrete subsection of the sentence. The period serves to end the sentence. So why should the quotation mark get to hog it? What if I’m calling someone a “nitwit.” Does that look right to you? No, it should clearly be “nitwit”. It just looks better. And that’s what I am doing from now on.