Learn English – Capitalizing First Letter of Word in Continuing Dialogue

capitalizationdialoguegrammarquotation marks

I have a rather tricky question – I'm a writer, about to send my manuscript off to agents and publishers, and have noticed I have a rather strange writing style, particularly when it comes to dialogue.

I tend to do this:

"We can't know for sure," he mused, leaning back in his chair, "Not until we ask more questions."

I capitalize the first letter of the first word in continuing dialogue.
I can't stand using a lower-case letter (as below).

"We can't know for sure," he mused, leaning back in his chair, "not until we ask more questions."

It doesn't look right to me, but am I committing some horrible faux pas here? I do the same with interior monologue.

I have to get out of here, he thought, But there's not enough time.

I also don't like putting full-stops everywhere. Most readers probably wouldn't notice the difference, but I'm afraid an Editor might look at the work, scoff, and toss the whole thing in the bin.

To complicate matters, I'm an Australian, writing in American English, but submitting to both British and American agents. Somewhere in there, I'm sure I've butchered up my grammar, but this is the most striking thing I noticed throughout my novel.

Any advice? Editing an 88K novel to find all the instances of dialogue might take a while, so is it really worth my time?

Thanks in advance!

Best Answer

Different publishers are likely to handle the punctuation differently. I doubt that you'll be able to please them all, whichever convention you adopt.

At this point, I'll express my own preferences plus my reasons for those preferences.

Where you wrote

"We can't know for sure," he mused, leaning back in his chair, "Not until we ask more questions."

I would turn the dialogue into two separate sentences:

"We can't know for sure," he mused, leaning back in his chair. "Not until we ask more questions."

This is particularly justified here, because if you cut out the description and present the dialogue on its own,

"We can't know for sure, not until we ask more questions."

it becomes apparent that what you wrote is a run-on sentence (i.e. its clauses are grammatically entirely independent).

With your other query sentence,

I have to get out of here, he thought, But there's not enough time.

the interior monologue is not a run-on:

I have to get out of here, but there's not enough time.

Accordingly, I would put but in lower case:

I have to get out of here, he thought, but there's not enough time.

In that sentence, you don't need to capitalize but to signal the resumption of the monologue: the italics are already doing that.

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