capitalization style question

[kaigou]

This summer I attended a writing retreat, and the critique I got back from the instructor made a number of corrections in capitalization. I was kinda like, hunh? because no one else has ever noted an issue with the same, until nagasvoice's comment in another post.

(I don't recall ever being taught the rules of punctuation/grammer/capitalizing in school -- fiction-writing wasn't ever a major focus, as I recall -- so I've mostly gone by what I read in books, and using that style. I guess you could say osmosis and a bit of logical guesswork taught me things like that punctuation goes inside the quotes (at least in US-based publications), etc.)

Normally, I'd write a sentence with dialogue like this.

"Hello," they said.

The entire sentence is hello-they-said. First word is 'hello', so it's capitalized. Since 'they' is not the first word and not a proper-name, it's not capitalized. Thus, it made sense to me that when the order is rearranged, the capitalizing is also rearranged:

They said, "hello."

I'm pretty sure this is a pattern I've read plenty, 'cause I had to have gotten the impression from somewhere that this is alright. It's also why/how I learned that when you've got a tag in the middle, capitalizing is still applied as an overall:

"Yesterday," she said, "it was sunny."

First, 'yesterday' is the first word. Second, the actual sentence -- 'yesterday it was sunny' is an entire sentence and the tag 'she said' is just inserted. Similar to the way if I had [ed: hi there] in the middle, it inserts, not halts the sentence and forces a new one. It's like a paren.

In my mind, if I've got a sentence like the following:

"Yesterday it was sunny," she said. "We napped."

...then the "we" gets capitalized because it's a new sentence; if it hadn't been, then it'd be a comma after 'said', not a period, and there'd need to be some kind of a tag -- ie, 'and', 'but', etc -- before 'we' to indicate there was more to the first sentence.

I'm not sure whether this is a house-style thing or just something I've completely misread/ignored all these years.

Anyone?

Comments

[the_rck]

By the rules I've been taught, most of your examples are correct. The exception is 'They said, "hello."' That should be 'They said, "Hello."'

When a bit of dialog comes after a dialog tag, it's capitalized if it starts a sentence within the dialog even if it's preceded by a comma. Dialog is peculiar that way.

[kaigou]

So that is an actual capitalization rule, and not a house-style thing?

What if it's a continuation of a sentence and the tag is just inserted, like:

"After that," she said, "there were two dogs."

where if you take the tag out, it'd be:

"After that, there were two dogs."

Does the 'there' get capitalized solely b/c of the tag, or is it treated as its own sentence and the tag as paren?

[the_rck]

Your capitalization is correct. You don't capitalize when the second bit of dialog continues the sentence begun in the first part.

Basically, the only time you capitalize dialog after a tag with a comma is if it starts a new, in-dialog sentence.

[kathmandu]

Confirming it's an actual capitalization rule. Sentences of speech are independent of the narrative sentences which frame them. So in

"Hello," they said.

the framing-sentence and the speech-sentence overlap beginnings; there is only one beginning-of-sentence capitalization for two sentences.

They said, "Hello."

Hello is the beginning of the speech, so it needs to be capitalized.

You have correctly picked up the rules for when framing is inserted in the middle of speech.

[branchandroot]

What they said. Dialogue doesn't count as part of the narrative sentence that contains it, despite the fact that narrative fragments may be interjected or dangling off the beginning or end. At that point, you have commas standing in for terminal punctuation and making you think narrative and dialogue are the same sentence-unit. Which they kind of are, but only for punctuation purposes, not capitalization purposes!

Narrative + dialogue rules are their own barrel of cats.

Ruth put it most succinctly.

[onyxlynx]

Those are, in fact, the rules. Good job, getting that by osmosis/example.

What was the instructor objecting to? Send that instructor to me.

[kaigou]

The instructor was saying that the second version -- 'they said, "hello"' -- should have the 'hello' capitalized, which seems to be what everyone's saying above. I had always seen dialogue as part of the sentence, capitalizing-wise, and not realized it gets its own separate, capitalization treatment.

Well, mostly. Exceptions always, of course, are the rule.

[onyxlynx]

Oh, that. Yeah. That's true. Sorry. Wet noodle.

[marahmarie]

Hello is where the sentence begins for the person speaking; it's the first word of their sentence. Therefore, you would capitalize it.

[law_nerd]

Agreeing with the_rck, and others. I just find it easier to understand with a bit more context. The rule is the same whether dealing with dialogue or other quotations, so a small expansion/explanation from one of my favourite how-to books, the Chicago Manual of Style (13th ed):

When a quotation is used as a syntactical part of a sentence, it begins with a lowercase letter, even though the original is a complete sentence beginning with a capital.

Benjamin Franklin admonishes us to "plough deep while sluggards sleep."

But when the quotation is not syntactically dependent on the rest of the sentence, the initial letter is capitalized. ...

As Franklin advised: "Plough deep while sluggards sleep."

[kaigou]

Okay, I knew that about quotations, but I didn't realize dialogue got the same rules. Then again, I was taught to be very strict about quotes, too, so my education would've said the first version would be:

Benjamin Franklin admonishes us to "[p]lough deep while sluggards sleep."

just to obnoxiously point out that it's not EXACTLY like the original. *eyeroll*

[law_nerd]

I don't have it at hand, mostly because I despise it quite passionately, but I'd not be surprised to find that the APA Style asks for that kind of exactitude. It's one of the joys of being a professional editor. New jobs with new publishers can mean learning a whole new way of doing things.

It would be lovely if publishers of fiction could get together and agree on a style guide... even if it were different ones for different countries it would make life easier for authors (and beta readers) working to make copy ready for submission. Doubt it'll ever happen, though. Given that academics can't seem to agree on a single style, or, for that matter agree to keep a style the same. (I call the current Canadian legal style guide the menopausal version. They've gone from recommending authors be cited as P. Smith, to P Smith, and from listing cases as "Able v. Baker" to "Able v Baker" -- I miss the periods.)

[kaigou]

v, v., that's odd. I was taught in govt class in school that the period was a piece of style that would clue you in on where the case was presented. Like, iirc, Supreme Court decisions are always 'v' while State was 'v.'. Also, that there are certain cases that get 'vs' -- I don't remember which, only that 'vs' is never used for Supreme Court. (Since govt class was focusing on constitutional law, that got most of our attention.)

I do know that there are several copy-editors on LJ/DW, and I recall some of them talking about publisher style-guides. Like, places where an author had been taught that it's X (and therefore diligently did X) yet the house style-guide declared it must be Y. With a footnote of the industry's internal debate over whether it's copy-editor, copy editor, or even copyeditor. It was like reading a run-down of my family's arguments over helman's vs mayo. Blood has been shed for less!

I don't know if journalism expects that kind of exactitude, but academia certainly does. Then again, academia is more likely to expect full citations and bibliography. Might have some impact, that people can check your sources for you (as opposed to demand your interview tapes, maybe?).

House-style is something I've just ignored, since as long as I'm unpublished it's not an issue for me. But there are some places I've seen authors -- justifiably, imo -- annoyed with copyeditors/editors flatly insisting on house-style. Things like what gets italics or which adjectives get capitalized, which can be a real political statement (see Older's youtube post about 'when we speak in spanish', I think it is).

[law_nerd]

Interesting that one would use different styles for different levels of court.

In all the Canadian style guides I've seen, the abbreviation for versus is the same whether it's the Supreme Court or Small Claims Court ... and whether the case cited is from Canada or from somewhere else. The trend has been to simpify citations -- in theory to make it easier for individuals who are self-representing to find caselaw and to cite it correctly. When I went to law school in the late 90's we were told that the style had just gone from vs. to v., and in a citation where the parties' names were in italic, the v. was to be plain. Next step was to make everything italic, and then most recently to drop the period.

And, yes, writing and editing nerd wars are as bloody as any other kind. Perhaps even more so, as we've been arguing over things like the Oxford comma for a lot longer than anyone's argued Mac/PC or Ninja/Pirate.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

She said, "Hello."

This is because, even though the part in quotes is not the beginning of the sentence, it is the first word in the sentence she's speaking.