Q. I’m looking for the etched-in-stone rule that states that a dialogue tag should be lowercase after a question (i.e., “What is it?” she asked, as opposed to “What is it?” She asked). I have both the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and the trial online version here and have so far been unable to find it. Any help is appreciated.
Q. Although CMOS 6.9 states clearly that commas and periods should always go within quotation marks, it doesn’t provide a solution when you have to put the single and double quotation marks together, as in “He announced, ‘These quotation marks look terrible.’” Is there a prescribed amount of space that goes between the single and double quotes in these cases?
Q. How do you handle text-message content? Is it put in quotation marks or do you use italics?
Q. Lots of questions here seem to boil down to a choice between rigorous consistency and a pleasing typographic appearance. Here’s another one. I was wondering about double quotation marks when shortening an article title in a footnote. If the full title of the article is “‘Un bell’oratorio all’uso di Roma’: Patronage and Secular Context of the Oratorio in Baroque Rome,” should I leave the double quotation marks when giving the short title, i.e., “‘Un bell’oratorio all’uso di Roma’”? It looks a bit silly, this doubly enshrined title. I would appreciate your take on this!
Q. I teach my students to keep the capitalization used in the original text when quoting in a paper or to indicate with brackets when the original text has been changed. I also tell them to alter the original casing to mesh into their sentences. However, examples in some English grammar books maintain the capitalization on poetry, even when meshing into a writer’s sentence, e.g., “Frost writes of the separation of ‘Two roads.’ ” Is this correct, or should it be “the separation of ‘[t]wo roads’ ”?
Q. I’m working on a manuscript where the author starts many block quotes with lowercase words. Is this okay?
Q. Microsoft Word just suggested I change “What do you mean ‘unfortunately?’ ” to “What do you mean ‘unfortunately’?” Should I tell Word to leave me alone, or am I mistaken in believing that, in American English, quotation marks envelop all neighboring punctuation?
Q. I’m in the process of editing a nonfiction book about a murder trial that took place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1983. I need to know whether courtroom testimony that the author quotes from the public record—and has set inside quotation marks—must be reproduced precisely as it was transcribed in the courtroom (except for elisions and paraphrases of testimony not set in quotes).
Q. I am in the awkward situation of trying to cite an excerpted book review that appears on the dust jacket of an updated edition of said monograph. While it seems technically correct to cite the name of the reviewer, the book being reviewed and its author, the title of the original source of the review, “quoted in” Book Being Reviewed, 2d ed. (publication information), jacket; this also strikes me as convoluted and vaguely ridiculous. Finding the source of the original review would provide a way out, I know, but I’d rather not sift through several months worth of copies of the Daily Telegraph (c. 1965).
Q. I am editing a manuscript that uses quotations from British texts. Can I silently change British spellings (such as “colour”) into American spellings in quotations?