RFI; can anyone recommend a style guide for prose writing? I know I'm doing a few things wrong (punctuation in speech, for example), and I'd like to have a reference for how to do it correctly.
Well, you could replace the comma after Lord Vrul with a period, and you'd be correct. In fact, I'm not sure that my comma there is correct, now that I look at it again.
"Blast! Does anyone have a spare battery?" is the complete quote. So even when it's interrupted by extraneous information, it retains its "original" punctuation and capitalization within the quotation marks. said Lord Vrul is parenthetical information that interrupts the entire quote. It can't stand on its own as a sentence, so it's not capitalized.
"Blast!" said Lord Vrul.can stand as a complete sentence, so if you want to end it with a period, that's fine. Then "Does anyone ..." is clearly its own sentence, and therefore takes a capital.
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The way my instincts would have written that is;
"Blast!" Said Lord Vrul, "does anyone have a spare battery?"
which I know is wrong.
If that's a whole sentence ending after "battery?", though, why does the "Does" get capitalized?
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"Blast! Does anyone have a spare battery?" is the complete quote. So even when it's interrupted by extraneous information, it retains its "original" punctuation and capitalization within the quotation marks. said Lord Vrul is parenthetical information that interrupts the entire quote. It can't stand on its own as a sentence, so it's not capitalized.
"Blast!" said Lord Vrul. can stand as a complete sentence, so if you want to end it with a period, that's fine. Then "Does anyone ..." is clearly its own sentence, and therefore takes a capital.
Good questions.
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"An interjection's set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not so strong."
Damn. Gonna have to run and watch that DVD now.