The beginning of quotions and capitalization

Question

When is it proper to capitalize the first letter in a quote? For instance, Malcom says that "Nature is made up of many little animals." Is it correct grammar to capitalize "nature" or should it not be capitalized? I do not have knowledge of when the first letter of quotations should or should not be capitalized. Do any of you know most or all of the rules related to this. Can you please tell me them?

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]When is it proper to capitalize the first letter in a quote? For instance, Malcom says that "Nature is made ... Do any of you know most or all of the rules related to this. Can you please tell me them?[/nq]
Yes, the first letter of anything in inverted commas should be capitalised. "Eats shoots and leaves" by Lynne Truss is a very good, and quite ammusing, guide to punctuation. Well worth a read.

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Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:16:40 -0500 meinte Colin Sharpe (Email Removed):
[nq:1]Yes, the first letter of anything in inverted commas should be capitalised. "Eats shoots and leaves" by Lynne Truss is a very good, and quite ammusing, guide to punctuation. Well worth a read.[/nq]
With "advice" like that, you cannot go wrong.

Tor

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]When is it proper to capitalize the first letter in a quote? For instance, Malcom says that "Nature is made ... Do any of you know most or all of the rules related to this. Can you please tell me them?[/nq]
First, note that I have changed the subject line (triggering Skitt's Law, no doubt).
There are two reasonable approaches:

1) Malcom says that "nature is made up of many little animals."
2) Malcom says that "(n)ature is made up of many little animals."

The second is common, but it is most common when beginning a sentence in mid quotation:

3) "(M)any little animals," says Malcom make up nature.The change in capitalization is an effort to "clean up quotations" (the phrase is from The New Yokk Times Manual of Style and Usage ), but can sometimes work to make them look messier and is necessary only as in example 3.
The Chicago A Manual of Style (12, rev.) disagrees with me, saving the brackets for one special case:

10.9 When a quotation. eotjer run into or set off from the text, isused as a syntactical part of the author's sentence, it begins with a lower-case letter, even though the original is a complete sentence beginning with a capital.

10.12 In legal works any change in capitaliztion is indicated bybrackets...
The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage has a version of Chicago's 10.12 above which is closer to my world: In cases where absolute accuracy in called for (for example, in legal or scholarly works), the changed capitalization is noted by use of brackets.

Note that punctuation between the lead-in and the quotation can change the choice. Colons usually call for initial caps (whether in the original or not), while commas usually call for the original capitalization.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]When is it proper to capitalize the first letter in ... rules related to this. Can you please tell me them?[/nq]
[nq:1]First, note that I have changed the subject line (triggering Skitt's Law, no doubt). There are two reasonable approaches: 1) Malcom says that "nature is made up of many little animals."[/nq]
Objection, yowannah.
A preliminary warning that what follows is my attempt to describe the situation in the US. I'm not qualified to discuss what goes on elsewhere as to this sort of thing. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled posting:
"That" should be (although unfortunately it isn't) reserved exclusively for use as a signal of indirect discourse, and what follows should not be in quotation marks.(1) It should be
1) Malcom says that nature is made up of many little animals.
[nq:1]2) Malcom says that "(n)ature is made up of many little animals."[/nq]
Same objection.
What's wrong with the obvious solution: Malcom says, "Nature is made up of many little animals" (aside from the fact that nature is made up of animals of all sizes)?
[nq:1]The second is common, but it is most common when beginning a sentence in mid quotation: 3) "(M)any little animals," ... and Usage ), but can sometimes work to make them look messier and is necessary only as in example 3.[/nq]
Lawyers switch from upper case to lower, and vice versa, at the start of quotations in order to conform to more general rules, which are:
1. In direct discourse, when quoting a complete independent clause(whether it's an entire sentence or only part of one), treat it as a sentence and capitalize the firss word. Otherwise, start the quotation with a lower-case letter. If the original text does not conform to these rules, switch the case of the first letter and put the result in square brackets. Hence:
- The judge said to the convicted felon, "You are sentenced to a term of thirty years in prison."
The indirect equivalent is:
- The judge said that the convicted felon was sentenced to a term of thirty years in prison.
Reverting to the first example, if what the judge had actually said was "I find you guilty as charged, and you are sentenced ...", that could lead to:
- The judge said "(Y)ou are sentenced ...", where the bracketed capital letter is inserted to conform to the general practice of capitalizing the first word of an independent clause and the brackets indicate that in the original text the word was not capitalized.

Of course, lawyers can ***** up even a free lunch, so you'll find them taking a perfectly sensible sentence like "Felonies are more serious than misdemeanors," and attributing and quoting it as follows:

- Jones, in his treatise on criminal law, says that "(f)elonies are more seroius than misdemeanors."
That gets one thing right a lower-case letter is required and supplied via bracketing but it's plainly inferior to:

"Felonies are more serious than misdemeanors."
or
- Jones, in his treatise on criminal law, says that felonies are more serious than misdemeanors.
And, of course, non-lawyers have seen "that" followed by direct quotations and have taken to it, much as they have annexed other legalisms better left to lawyers, like "as such" to mean "therefore" and "leading question" misused in all sorts of ways.

So it goes.

(1) Yes, this is a meliorist view of the language (and of course I can't really criticize Brother Martin for reporting the unfortunate truth). But I do think that this is one time when such a view is appropriate. We can get along just fine without ever using "that" to introduce direct quotation.

The beginning of quotions and capitalization

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