"KILL ME A SON!," GOD SAID TO ABRAHAM. "WHAT?," ASKED ABRAHAM, "YOU MUST BE PUTTIN' ME ON." "YOU DO WHAT YOU WANT TO, BUT NEXT TIME I SEE YOU, YOU BETTER RUN!," REPLIED GOD. "WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?," ASKED ABRAHAM. Saddle up, grammar cowboys, the Friday Grammar Rodeo is starting. Which of these passages is correct, and which are mispunctled?
- "How much," she said. "For three hundred dollars I'll do it."
- "Is something wrong?" she said. Of course there is. "You're still alive!" she said. Oh, do I deserve to be?
- "There must be some kind of way out of here!," said the joker to the thief.
We know that punctuation belongs inside the quotation marks, unless you have the misfortune of being born in England. The dilemma is what to do with the punctuation if you are following the quotation with an attribution -- "he said"; "she asked"; "they shouted in unison." Ordinarily, it's not a problem -- we just drop the period and put a comma before the close-quote. But if we want to employ a question mark or an exclamation point (assume the propriety of the latter), then what? Omit, question mark/exclamation point only, or the weird double-punctuation thing with the mark/point followed by a comma?
The Orange Bible, perhaps surprisingly,
thinks that #3 above is the way to go: "The sixteenth edition of
CMOS recommends using a comma after a question mark if it would normally be required." This looks the most wrong to me, and consensus at
ALOTT5MA HQ is that #2 is the best option. Are we wrong?
