Grammatical question...

[Captain Pike]

I always have trouble with dialogue. Nowadays, there's lots of freedom about the, "laws" of dialogue, but let's just say, for the sake of correctness, what's the proper way to do this: consider the following paragraph:


"Come on over, right now. Antonio is back", she says it like he's an old flame or something. That just means it will be that much more dangerous, going to her house. "Are you coming?", she's demanding now, after waiting half a second for my answer to the first question.

I don't want to end the sentence after the, "are you coming?" -- I mean it's a question. But if I put the ? after her words, then that's the end of the sentence, right? How can I include an interrogative sentence fragment in my sentence, as I try to above. Maybe not using the ? will still allow the reader to know it's a question. Aaarriggh, the stuff bugs me!
Anybody got any ideas?

[billl]

Captain Pike, you are a Star Fleet hero, and I have no idea how you are typing in that beeping chair. But let me say that I'd be happy to go over this issue, because I recently was inspired to research a particular matter of quoting and questions.

First, though, I want to point out that in your quoted section, it is not correct to put a comma following a quotation mark. If you move the first of the two commas inside the quotation marks, and eliminate the second one (after the quoted question), then the quoted section works fine, and is punctuated in a standard way.


"Come on over, right now. Antonio is back," she says it like he's an old flame or something. That just means it will be that much more dangerous, going to her house. "Are you coming?" she's demanding now, after waiting half a second for my answer to the first question.


Of course, the first sentence could've been written as two sentences, but that's a stylistic choice:
"Come on over, right now. Antonio is back." She says it like he's an old flame or something.

Here's some simple and perhaps clumsily laid out rules, and there are exceptions (and some things might occasionally differ depending on whether one is writing according to "British rules" or "American rules" or if one's employer has some special set of rules, etc. Anyhow, this much is pretty much standard, I think. If not, it probably reflects an unintentional American bias:

Use a comma instead of a period, when the quote doesn't end the sentence. For commas, question marks, and exclamation points, go ahead and use a comma, question mark, or exclamation point.


"Come here, when you have a chance," he said.
"Come here," he said, "when you have a chance."
"Come here!" he yelled.
"Can you come here?" he asked.
He asked her, in a whisper, "Can you come here?"

If a quoted sentence is split apart at a point where no punctuation would be present, put a comma at the end of the first part of the quote. For example:


JOE: I never make grammatical mistakes
"I never," said Joe, "make grammatical mistakes."

BASICALLY, one should not put punctuation immediately after a quotation mark, when the quotation mark is used around quoted speech. But there are some relatively rare exceptions. At least one, anyhow:

For me, the most useful thing I've had resolved about this lately involves cases in which a question involves a quote, or there is some sort of ambiguity about whether the quotation is a question, or the larger 'sentence' is a question, or whether both might be questions. That is horribly stated, so I will press on with some examples.


1. Did you once say, "I absolutely deserved this award"?
2. He was shocked, and mumbled to the presenter, "I deserve this award?"

In the first example, someone is asking if another person had been sort of immodest or something. The 'whole thing' is a question (the quoted part is NOT a question) and so the question mark should go outside the quotes.
In the second example, the 'whole thing' is a statement/narration, and it is only the quoted part that represents a question. So the question mark joins the quotation within the quotation marks.

The same sort of thing applies with exclamation points:


1. The service was terrible! I can't believe that idiot said, "No, it's basically fine"!
2. I feel sad when I think back to him yelling, "Help! Help!"


I hope that makes some sense, sorry if I went way beyond the scope of the original question.

What I'm wondering is if the following is OK:


Are you the one who muttered, "I deserve this award?"?

[Captain Pike]

and I don't know how you're typing, sitting in that bleeping chair... [or something like that]

Bill, Bill, Bill... thank you for your generous reply -- I'll go on to thank you some more, but first, allow me to express my flattered gratitude that you would be mindful of my condition.
It's a long day for me, typing with some sort of prosthetic and pathetic "sticks", or something or other, lashed to my hands. I have no use of my fingers -- at least not in the normal sense. Actually, my fingers are very useful, much like the tines on a fork are useful, LOL.

I use speech recognition software. As it turns out, I seem to have the perfect voice for this kind of thing. Owing to necessity, more than really anything else, I have become an absolute expert at using this system. I'm a computer guy, a software engineer who used the computer extensively in my private life as well. So when I was injured, losing that ease of use was right up there with many of the other, more obvious deficits which I had to face.

I remember being in the ICU, with my favorite nurse, I'm breathing by means of a ventilator, and trying to ask him if he could check my email using his, rolling, high-tech, hospital-computer-thingy. We'd worked out a system, an efficient way of my spelling out words with nods and winks and a specially engineered scrap of paper with rows of letters on it.

"Oh," he expostulated, "check your e-mail! I get it! Let's see now, I think I can, actually...". It was a breakthrough, and I had a ton of junk e-mails. One I remember that wasn't junk though, was a letter, stating that I had been selected to be the guy who would read the book, for an audio book project which I had auditioned/applied for on the day of my accident! The guy tried calling to offer me this job and couldn't understand why I wouldn't reply. They used another fellow, obviously, and I remember our laughing about the idea of being the voice of a book on tape when I had no larynx online! It's crazy the things that are funny sometimes.

Anyway, thank you for the tutorial. I'm actually going to keep it -- might even print it out to refer to. Everything you've laid out here is completely obvious. It's just that, sometimes in the thick of it, I got a little sketchy.

For this particular project I'm working on, I have to use Microsoft Word. Not meaning any disrespect towards Microsoft, it's not my choice for a word processor. It's big and ungainly, bogging down just about any computer I might be using. It tries to do so much, it's no wonder it slows things down sometimes.
This all grew out of the fact that the grammar correcting facility kept balking on the question mark inside of quotation marks, without its defining the end of this sentence. It seems to think this is a definite no-no.
I owe no allegiance to any software wizards, Microsoft or other. In fact, I take full poetic license, especially in this piece, and I would for just about anything I might write.

See the advantages here... I'm going on and on and my keyboard, well, just like my shoes -- the're old but showing almost no signs of wear! I can laugh at that.

For-sale:
men's size 11 shoe,
like new.

There may be some Hemingway in me, after all. "Thank you Bill, for all your help!", he said.

PS: (let's actually do some work here)
it turns out, I definitely need help with this. Are you saying then that the following,

"I didn't know who you were, Tom", she is giggling on the phone, "are you coming over?", she is such an airhead.

should be instead,

"I didn't know who you were, Tom," she is giggling on the phone, "are you coming over?" she is such an airhead.

OR EVEN BETTER:
"I didn't know who you were, Tom," she is giggling on the phone. "Are you coming over?" she is such an airhead.

For some reason, I don't like this latter form. It seems as though ending the sentence lends an amount of calmness and clarity to the discourse which I don't like.

Very interesting stuff.

[billl]

Captain,

Thanks so much for your response. You know, from the beginning I was really just referring to the guy in the Avatar, your LitNet namesake. Then, I forget the sequence of events now, but I ended up reading that you had some kind of condition. I looked over your blog (that is, I'm pretty sure, where I noticed, but it might have been on some other thread out there), and I was sort of like, wow--a combination of "cool avatar for such a LitNet member" and "geez, I better check what I typed..." Anyhow, it was just a joke about the original Captain Pike's rudimentary means of communication, and I got lucky in my inadvertent ride along your comedic coattails. I was 'mindful' of some condition, but not as soon as you give me credit for.

In your blog (I admit, I didn't read every entry, mostly skimmed, and checked some pics) I saw a lot of beautiful stuff, and could tell that there's plenty interesting going on, with plenty of joy and good sights. And some drama that I do, in fact, envy, about what house to buy. I'm a big fan of Shenandoah (I went there every week almost, one year, and got to see the same views change with the seasons), which I saw you mention--man, pretty much every week, I'm wishing I could drive out there again. (I'm in Texas now.)

Thanks for sharing a very interesting story, and in a generous and comfortable manner, really, thanks, I think it likely increases the impact of the breakthrough with the emails, etc.

~~~

In regards to your latest quote, I think the style resembles the style from the other quote in the OP (in which I mentioned an alternate way of punctuating it). Again (just for the record, really, now that I know that it is a stylistic thing) I would punctuate it like this:


"I didn't know who you were, Tom," she is giggling on the phone, "are you coming over?" She is such an airhead.

It is pretty standard to not put the comma after the quotation mark (putting it after "Tom" instead), but making the 'airhead' bit a single sentence is purely stylistic choice. You did it a similar way in an example from the OP (about the "old flame"), and I think that it would work well if you are consistently holding a lot of text together, in one sentence, like that. It adds a little energy, as you mention, and could make for an interesting narrator.

So, in that case, this one, the one you prefer, is great:


"I didn't know who you were, Tom," she is giggling on the phone, "are you coming over?" she is such an airhead.

By the way, I tried to get a manuscript published when I was wayyyyy too young, and fortunately [sic] it didn't happen--but I did learn that non-standard punctuation immediately gets mentioned in an unapproving manner. And those guys are probably often looking for excuses to move on to the next envelope. So, definitely, I'd say be careful about the commas.

~~~

Finally, I loved your anecdote about Microsoft Word, and how it tries to do too much. It reminded me of an example used in a fantastic recent book by Jaron Lanier, called You Are Not A Gadget. Since you are an IT guy, you might find it interesting. (Maybe you've heard of Lanier?) In critiquing a particular big-picture silicon valley mindset--in which everything is just greater and greater perspective on information (levels of description)--and how it ends up making people increasingly obsolete so that computers can seem more advanced, he talks about his own frustration with Word, as a sort of easy-to-get example (pp.27-8):


...You might have had the experience of having Microsoft Word suddenly determine, at the wrong moment, that you are creating an indented outline. While I am all for the automation of petty tasks, this is different.
From my point of view, this type of design feature is nonsense, since you end up having to work more than you would otherwise in order to manipulate the software's expectations of you. The real function of the feature isn't to make life easier for people. Instead, it promotes a new philosophy, that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves.

It is a great book, and I highly recommend it. He is far from being a Luddite, but he has some sharp criticisms of how things have been moving--and some new ideas for different approaches. Sorry for this sudden outburst of book promotion. I'll end it with a link to the book, to make up for the extended quotation:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307269647
There's a brief interview there, too, that sort of scratches the surface.

~~~

Anyhow, I am really flattered that you think that my punctuation explanation was worth printing out. Maybe it is brief, which can be good. And it matches the Chicago Manual of Style, among others. But here's another, longer, but perhaps clearer summary, that might be useful as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks#Punctuation

OK, well I think I've got to stop typing sometime. Thanks again for the original opportunity to ramble about my own recent discovery about punctuation, and now follow up with more rambling about this and that.

[billl]

Very interesting stuff.

One more thing. This is, indeed, very interesting stuff. The biggest challenge for me when I was working on my manuscript was trying to understand the difference between what a line looked like the first time I thought/typed/read it, and the twentieth time, after some fine-tuning. Not to mention how it would look to someone encountering it the first time, having had no part in the creation of the sentence at all.
I'm on the verge of rambling about that now, and there are others on this site with far more experience and insight into this (including, perhaps, you yourself), so I'm just going to stop.

[Virgil]

I always have trouble with dialogue. Nowadays, there's lots of freedom about the, "laws" of dialogue, but let's just say, for the sake of correctness, what's the proper way to do this: consider the following paragraph:



I don't want to end the sentence after the, "are you coming?" -- I mean it's a question. But if I put the ? after her words, then that's the end of the sentence, right? How can I include an interrogative sentence fragment in my sentence, as I try to above. Maybe not using the ? will still allow the reader to know it's a question. Aaarriggh, the stuff bugs me!
Anybody got any ideas?

Captain, I think either option is grammatically correct. I would write it the way you feel comfortable with and slants the meaning as you want it. You can include that interrogatgive either way. If it ends the sentence, the reader understands it's for the dialogue part of the sentence and that the entire sentence is not a question. I wouldn't get too hung up on it if I were you.

[xtianfriborg13]

I don't want to end the sentence after the, "are you coming?" -- I mean it's a question. But if I put the ? after her words, then that's the end of the sentence, right? How can I include an interrogative sentence fragment in my sentence, as I try to above. Maybe not using the ? will still allow the reader to know it's a question. Aaarriggh, the stuff bugs me!
Anybody got any ideas?

Yeah, you can do that! Capitalize the first word of the next sentence, though, and don't put a comma. :)