That’s what I stick to. If a sentence begins and ends within a quote, the stop is also within the quote. If the sentence starts outside of quotes, I end it outside of quotes, regardless of whether it’s “correct”.
This is what I do. Technical writing should communicate your ideas to the reader as clearly as possible. Sometimes I think people who focus too much on 'correctness' in grammar and such forget writing and language is used to communicate, that's it's primary purpose. If rules leave ambiguity in the intent of the communication, maybe those rules just kind of suck.
But then technically you’d need to add additional punctuation to actually end the outer sentence, “like this!”. I have a firm preference of putting punctuation that does not belong to the quote itself outside of it, and when I want to add punctuation that does belong to the quote inside, I usually work around the problem above by just putting the quote after a colon: “like this!”
