UKC

If you're quoting the first word of a sentence within the sentence you're writing, does it retain its capital letter?

Thinking about it, capitalisation isn't covered by the rules of grammar.

The question still stands, though.

In reply to Chris Harris:
As in 'What's the answer?', asked Chris.

T.
Edit: having now found my copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage, the answer is yes.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:
That sort of thing.

I wrote: "You need to have a comma after the word 'Also'", when correcting the punctuation of a sentence beginning with the word "Also" (or is it "also"?)

I probably buggered the punctuation in that sentence good & proper......

In reply to Chris Harris: My Ladybird book "Spelling and Grammar" definitely indicates the use of capitalisation within quotes. If you are quoting a sentence, then all the grammar rules for that sentence apply within the quotes.

It's a brilliant little book that actually makes grammar understandable, especially to those of us who, due to the comprehensive school system at the time, never learnt English grammar. Unfortunately I don't think it's available any more.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Thanks, chaps. I had a feeling that was the case, but wanted to be sure.

Cheers
Chris

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Ah! Fowler...!

In reply to Chris Harris:

If you were being totally fussy about quoting exactly, and the quote isn't the start of a sentence and hence wasn't capitalised in the original I guess you could put it in square brackets in the academic way: "[O]nce upon a time..."

But seriously, there must be more to life than this!

In reply to TobyA:


More than pedantry? As a 52 year old bloke who hardly ever climbs now and who's job involves scrutinising others reports and signing them off....pedantry is a saving grace!

In reply to abr1966:

I still suffer from having done a good deal of proof-reading. Yesterday, I was getting annoyed with a book I was reading because there were sometimes the standard two spaces between a full stop and the start of a new sentence, and sometimes only one.

It wouldn't have got past my red pen...

T.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Absolutely!
Sadly I'm now considered something of a dinosaur, it's all 'strike through' or 'track changes' nowadays....I still like my red pens!

In reply to abr1966:

Ahem!

...others' reports...

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
;p

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Do you really mean double spaces in proofs for a book? Two spaces are no longer standard, even for word-processed manuscripts before they're typeset, and haven't been for years. The typesetter/page layout designer works (in InDesign or Pagemaker etc) with single spaces, typically set to 1 em (or slightly bigger.) But that's just the starting point: in practice, almost every line of every page has to be tweaked, with kerning and tracking, to avoid hyphenation as far as possible, and 'widows' and 'orphans' at the top of pages and the bottom of paragraphs. If it's done well the reader will very rarely be aware of it. Quite a tricky art.

In reply to JCurrie:


Thank you, great fully acknowledged!

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Off-topic...having read your profile, I'm intrigued to know what did/didn't happen in 2016 and what may happen in 2017!

In reply to abr1966:


"Whose job". Thank you and goodnight

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Indeed it is, and different now to the days of galley proofs and page proofs when I started. But anything that passed across my desk didn't leave it until it had two spaces after a full point.

Whether, these days, it matters a damn is a different thing. But if something in print is sufficiently disruptive to the reader then that's an all-round failure.

T.

In reply to Castleman:

Ah, in 2015 I rested, in 2016 I enjoyed a nice sit down twice a day and in 2017 I hope to be enjoying a short walk every now and then.

Thank you for your interest!

T.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:


Agreed. The latter is the overriding principle. Book design is a beautiful business really.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Is TeX widely used for typesetting (non-mathematical) books?
I used LateX to write my thesis a few years ago and found it most straightforward to use and it handled the most complex of equations with ease. I recall the focus of the program was for the writer to concentrate on the content and leave the typesetting, layout, referencing and numbering to the computer which it managed well.

In reply to richard_hopkins:

I'm talking about commercially published books. There is a host of aesthetic issues that can't be decided by a computer.

In reply to Sean Kelly:


Robbie or Arfur?

In reply to krikoman:


Mick, surely?

In reply to Chris Harris:
Yes. But equally important is that if you are quoting and want to change UC to LC or vice versa because it fits what you are saying better (or any other change for that matter eg spelling of a place from an old fashioned orthography), you indicate the change by putting it in square brackets. "[t]he... ".

In reply to krikoman:

Henry Watson Fowler actually
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Watson_Fowler