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snorkackcatcherThe recent submission of You Tell Her was accepted only with caveats, and a strong suggestion that the story be edited and resubmitted. Some of those caveats I've no problem with (they were bona fide typos that missed both my checks and those of the betas), but one complaint just sounds -- well, wrong, actually, and a sanity check from anyone with knowledge of Writing Proper would be appreciated ...
Apologies if this is tl;dr.
The sentences to which objections were raised had a character's speech interrupted to describe some action they were performing. The example given as incorrect had Ginny speaking to Hermione about Harry:
(1) "He came to see me, and" -- both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced -- "he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
The suggested change was:
(2) There must always be some closing punctuation mark before a closing quotation mark. When dialogue is interrupted by a sentence that is not part of the dialogue, it generally follows this pattern:
Correct: "He came to see me, and--" Both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced. "--he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
Now this sounded odd, so I did some checking on the web. Although this seems to be a fairly obscure problem, I did find a couple of contradictory references. One Mother Miller (who is, as far as I can gather, a fantasy author who has also written a book about writing) suggests a third form of punctuation, which for the example above would be:
(3) "He came to see me, and--" both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced "--he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
On the other hand, according to this thread the Chicago Manual of Style 15th edition decrees something that is basically what I had (except for the absence of spaces around the em-dashes, and since this is intended for screen reading rather than typesetting that might be considered acceptable):
(4) "He came to see me, and"--both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced--"he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
So, what's the best practice then? To my eye, both (2) and (3) just look wrong.
The Miller suggestion (3) has the phrase both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced floating between two chunks of dialogue, without any punctuation to connect it to the rest of the sentence.
The recommended version (2) seems even worse. It has the first part of the dialogue ending, and the interrupting phrase then made into a sentence in its own right; and then has the second part of the dialogue starting up again as if the period had never been there.
I suspect this may be one of those awkward situations where practice varies between editors, but certainly the FA suggestion seems rather like a case of applying a general rule to an exception. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
Apologies if this is tl;dr.
The sentences to which objections were raised had a character's speech interrupted to describe some action they were performing. The example given as incorrect had Ginny speaking to Hermione about Harry:
(1) "He came to see me, and" -- both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced -- "he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
The suggested change was:
(2) There must always be some closing punctuation mark before a closing quotation mark. When dialogue is interrupted by a sentence that is not part of the dialogue, it generally follows this pattern:
Correct: "He came to see me, and--" Both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced. "--he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
Now this sounded odd, so I did some checking on the web. Although this seems to be a fairly obscure problem, I did find a couple of contradictory references. One Mother Miller (who is, as far as I can gather, a fantasy author who has also written a book about writing) suggests a third form of punctuation, which for the example above would be:
(3) "He came to see me, and--" both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced "--he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
On the other hand, according to this thread the Chicago Manual of Style 15th edition decrees something that is basically what I had (except for the absence of spaces around the em-dashes, and since this is intended for screen reading rather than typesetting that might be considered acceptable):
(4) "He came to see me, and"--both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced--"he said he'd hated having to split up . . ."
So, what's the best practice then? To my eye, both (2) and (3) just look wrong.
The Miller suggestion (3) has the phrase both her smile and her air of bewilderment became more pronounced floating between two chunks of dialogue, without any punctuation to connect it to the rest of the sentence.
The recommended version (2) seems even worse. It has the first part of the dialogue ending, and the interrupting phrase then made into a sentence in its own right; and then has the second part of the dialogue starting up again as if the period had never been there.
I suspect this may be one of those awkward situations where practice varies between editors, but certainly the FA suggestion seems rather like a case of applying a general rule to an exception. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
