This is wonderful: a great service to us all, with such clear and comprehensive examples. There's an enormous amount of wrongly-punctuated dialogue in fanfic, especially with pronouns in dialogue tags, so I hope that this post gets a lot of attention.
In keeping with my own view of the execrable editing in the HP books, I disagree with their use of the colon and the semicolon in the examples cited above. (Not a criticism of you!) Capitalization after a colon is not standard in British English, as far as I'm aware, nor is it in many American style guides. (And in the ones that do call for capitalization, it's usually only if the colon is followed by more than one sentence, which is not the case in that example from HBP). This one's arguable, I suppose, but the semicolon example following it is actually wrong.
In the Voldemort/trophies sentence, I would have used a colon instead of a semicolon. It's sort of an inverse syntactical-descriptive colon, with the list of items appearing first. His pride, his superiority, his determination: these do not constitute a complete sentence and should not be followed by a semicolon as if they do. These are quibbles against Scholastic, though, not this post, which I think was incredibly awesome and helpful. If there's one mistake that I could wave a wand and banish, it's capitalizing speech tag pronouns after ! or ? (like this: "Do you mean to tell me we're out of lube?" He said. So sadly wrong in so many ways.)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:40 am (UTC)In keeping with my own view of the execrable editing in the HP books, I disagree with their use of the colon and the semicolon in the examples cited above. (Not a criticism of you!) Capitalization after a colon is not standard in British English, as far as I'm aware, nor is it in many American style guides. (And in the ones that do call for capitalization, it's usually only if the colon is followed by more than one sentence, which is not the case in that example from HBP). This one's arguable, I suppose, but the semicolon example following it is actually wrong.
In the Voldemort/trophies sentence, I would have used a colon instead of a semicolon. It's sort of an inverse syntactical-descriptive colon, with the list of items appearing first. His pride, his superiority, his determination: these do not constitute a complete sentence and should not be followed by a semicolon as if they do. These are quibbles against Scholastic, though, not this post, which I think was incredibly awesome and helpful. If there's one mistake that I could wave a wand and banish, it's capitalizing speech tag pronouns after ! or ? (like this: "Do you mean to tell me we're out of lube?" He said. So sadly wrong in so many ways.)