Authors & Reviewers discussion

So, I had an editor review the first chapter of one of my books and she suggested that I capitalize the he/she in he said, she said.

Like this.

"Ouch! That really hurt." He said.

It doesn't look right to me. The book I am reading now does it like this.

"Ouch! That really hurt." he said.

I also found this...

http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/wr...

Thoughts?

i have read books where people bold or italicize it

Thanks Jackie. Not my thing to do that though. Italics should be used sparingly at least that is my opinion. I try to leave just plain he said/she said's out and add what the character is doing but this editor capitalized these as well.

okay

Just found this link that describes it really well. I don't want to call the editor wrong, because I don't know all there is to know about grammar and punctuation, but I know my agent is good and she tells us you don't capitalize the he/she part of the dialgoue tag. It's part of the whole sentence. It gets a comma, and the he/she part is lower case.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/s...

I have seen it like that too.

Yeah, if it's like "he said" or "she said" its a comma with a lower case. It's only uppercase with a period if its not saying they said or stated or asked, etc something but rather a sentence such as, to use your own sentence,
"Ouch! That really hurt." He rubbed his arm where she hit him. (I don't know the action, I'm just making one up)
Where as the "Ouch! That really hurt," he said
Would be exactly like that.

J.M. wrote: "Just found this link that describes it really well. I don't want to call the editor wrong, because I don't know all there is to know about grammar and punctuation, but I know my agent is good and s..."

Thanks J.M. That is what I thought too. It just doesn't look right. I'll check out the link.

M

S.K.N. wrote: "Yeah, if it's like "he said" or "she said" its a comma with a lower case. It's only uppercase with a period if its not saying they said or stated or asked, etc something but rather a sentence such ..."

Looks right to me. I'm glad you both agree with me because I would not be happy if I had to rewrite all 400 and some odd pages of my book this way!

I've been working with an editor for over three weeks now and she keeps having problems with my Word 2010 documents.

First...she edited the entire manuscript and sent it to me. I found several errors that she had thought that she caught.

I sent her back the manuscript with highlights of what I had changed or found wrong. She then made her corrections and saved the document to her computer.

Then she had to reinstall Word due to her changes not showing up.

She re-edited the entire document again, made more changes and then began to go through it paragraph by paragraph to format it.

Today she wrote and said that she if finding errors that she knows she corrected.

Can anyone help me with suggestions on what we are doing wrong or what the problem might be?

Thank you for your time.

Marisa

That's weird... I have an editor as well who didn't seem to have issues but she and I both have word 10.
Maybe your editor has word 2007. Transferring/ editing documents with different word versions often have issues. Word 2010 doesn't register all changes made on word 2007 and vise versa.

Technically dialog tags ( he said, she said) are lowercase unless proper nouns (Gareth said.)

Though I'd the dialog ends in anything other than a comma the dialog tag is capitalized.

Thanks Rachael!