Good writing is self-effacing.
Personally, when I’m critiquing fiction, I find it very, very difficult to evaluate things like character, plot, and pacing if there are a lot of distracting technical errors.
One easily fixable error I often see is this one.
Whenever I see this mistake, I feel as if I have been stabbed in the eye.
EDIT (2025-08-26): I have just learned from my husband Siqi that the first example, with a period inside the quotation marks, is correct in Chinese. That might explain why I was seeing people write that way in Singapore!
