Common punctuation error

8 Comments

I see lots of different kinds of punctuation and capitalization errors, but it just occurred to me that there's one I see remarkably often: using a period at the end of a line of dialogue and capitalizing the beginning of the following "She said" or "He said." Like this:

"That'll be fifteen zlotys." She said.

"That's a lot of money." He said.

"Is it too much?" She asked.

And so on. (Sometimes people do this once or twice by accident, but I'm talking about the stories where it's consistent throughout the story.) I always figured it was just people who'd never learned the right way to do it, but I see it so often that I'm beginning to wonder if it was ever taught that way in some place or time. Maybe it's just that people learn you're supposed to put a period at the end of a sentence and capitalize all sentences, but nobody ever teaches them that punctuation for dialogue is handled in an unusual way?

(Standard disclaimer: I know you're all about to tell me about the brilliant work of experimentalist stylistic genius that you wrote that uses this extremely important and valid literary technique. No need. If you do it intentionally, I don't object to it, though it would probably still irritate me. The stories I'm talking about are not doing it as an interesting stylistic diversion; the authors clearly don't know there's anything unusual about their approach.)

8 Responses to “Common punctuation error”

  1. Sherwood Smith

    Putting on my school teacher hat for a moment, I noticed this most often in kids who would come to us from public schools that were teaching Whole Language (which is now discontinued, but loosed a lot of kids onto the world with zilcho grammatical training).

    The kids quite reasonably figured, when I nailed them for it, that because punctuation had preceded, they had to capitalize. “Did you go to school?” She asked. “I did!” He exclaimed.

    The other weird form I see are commas joining dialogue and action. I’ve since spotted it in Georgette Heyer and other writers of her period: “Here I go,” he rode off. “I hate you,” she slammed the door. I find that more jarring than said weird dialogue tags. (“I hate you,” she frowned.)

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  2. Tempest

    I noticed this in many of my novel writing students as well. I think it’s just the failure of schools to teach that dialogue has special punctuation needs.

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  3. Jeff Hildebrand

    I don’t have a copy of Word handy to check, but I wonder if it “fixes” the capitalization automatically resulting in at least some of the instances you see.

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  4. Vardibidian

    I’ve typed in

    “Is Jeff right?” he asked. “Is Jeff right?” He asked. “Jeff is wrong.” He said. “Jeff is wrong,” he said. “Jeff is wrong.” He said. “Jeff is wrong.” He said. “Jeff is partially right!” he said. “Jeff is wrong!” He said.

    and Word hasn’t put the green wavy lines under any of them.
    Word does, however, have custom-settable punctuation guides, which would, unfortunately, not remove all of these commas, or at least those commas which, as many of your readers know, are not grammatically incorrect, or, rather, are grammatically correct, but make the sentence more, rather than less, difficult to read.

                               ,
    -Vardibidian.

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  5. David Moles

    Never mind the schools; don’t they pay any attention to the punctuation in the books they read? (Or do they read?)

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  6. Karen

    That’s what I wonder. I learned all my grammar by reading books, except for the really sticky bits you argue about later with pedantic friends.

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  7. John B

    There are great schools out there with respect to English and grammar (and don’t use me as an example). All three of my children came out of high school with an excellent grasp of grammer, punctuation, and spelling. All due to the efforts of a very focused and excellent teacher. She drills it in, and her students agree that they enter college able to write a paper.

    And this is a public school. Gasp!

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  8. Jed

    Some belated responses:

    Sherwood: Fascinating about Georgette Heyer joining dialogue and action; I’ve never been bothered at all by unusual speaking verbs like “she frowned,” but I agree that it’s jarring when it’s an action unrelated to the speaking.

    Jeff: I think you’re right about Word. Specifically, if I turn on all of Word’s evil autocorrect features (but I guess “evil autocorrect” is redundant), and I type:

    “Jeff is right.” he stated.

    then Word changes the “he” to “He”. So I’m now pretty confident that (at least part of) what’s happening is that some people don’t know about using commas in place of periods at the end of dialogue, and so they use periods, and Word autocorrects the following word to be capitalized. That’s probably not all of what’s going on, though, as Word does understand not to capitalize the pronoun in

    “Is Jeff right?” she asked.

    and I’m pretty sure that people often capitalize that pronoun as well. But I suppose if Word corrects you often enough, you learn to do things the way Word wants you to, so people may’ve learned the wrong way from watching Word.

    Of course, Word is right in that if you punctuate the dialogue correctly, it does the right thing:

    “Jeff is right.” He was sure of it.

    In other words, Word thinks that if you end the dialogue with a period, the following phrase can’t be a speech tag—which is true, it’s just that Word doesn’t realize that the period may be the mistake rather than the lack of capitalization.

    David M and Karen: I too osmosed/intuited a lot of grammar and punctuation from reading, but I think a lot of people don’t pay that close attention to it. An analogy: I’d been able to sight-read treble-clef sheet music for about ten years before someone watched me writing down some musical notes and told me the rule about when the stems on notes go up and when they go down; I just hadn’t ever consciously noticed the pattern, so I was going by intuition, and got some things wrong.

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