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The British style works best with the Penguin style of using single quotes for the outer level of quotation rather than double quotes. Part of the reason we write “this.” is for esthetics. Compare:

“this.”

“this”.

‘this’.

The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or last.

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The middle version really doesn't look worse. Perhaps you are just conditioned to read the US version and so your aesthetics have been changed by the familiarity with the US format?

What makes it _objectively_ worse? Subjectively, I think it looks better than the first one and as good as the last one.

The period gets pushed out into isolation by the quotation marks. In Verdana, which is the default font for text on HN, ” is fairly narrow, but for other typefaces, the effect is quite dramatic.

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