ESL General English Grammar Questions

Re: Speech - capitalisation

Cool Breeze — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:41:49 GMT

Anonymous
Thanks for your reply. I'm a bit confused about the whole period right after hard. Being in the UK, I always thought the period should go after the quotation mark in an instance such as this. Any advice on this? Thanks!

Hmm... As I said, I abhor uniformity. However, I don't think putting the period after the quotation mark is very common. This is from The Independent's web site:

He added: "If we were to change now we would destroy the consistency and stability that business craves and private sector investors need."

Re: Speech - capitalisation

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:51:52 GMT

Thanks for your reply. I'm a bit confused about the whole period right after hard. Being in the UK, I always thought the period should go after the quotation mark in an instance such as this. Any advice on this? Thanks!

Re: Speech - capitalisation

Cool Breeze — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:36:31 GMT

Sentence 1 is fine if you place the period/full stop right after hard, before the quotation mark. The comma after say is correct as well. A colon could be used instead of it and is quite common if the quotation is long.

Sentence 2 is fine with me as it is. I wouldn't put working hard in quotes at all and to have appears redundant to me. There are different ways to see and do things. If you want to write sentence 2 the way you have written it, by all means, do! I abhor uniformity.

Speech - capitalisation

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:37:19 GMT

Hey everyone - any help with the following would be most appreciated

(1) My dad always used to say, "Work hard".

Am I correct in capitalising "work" in this instance; indeed, have I used the comma correctly after say? I know that in direct speech that this would be ok, but I'm unsure as to how it all works in indirect speech.

(2) My dad always used to say that "working hard" is an important virtue to have.

Am I correct in not capitalising "working" here?

Thanks everyone!