Q. How does one handle a parenthetical phrase within dialogue? For example, is this correct? “Hi, Tiger (his father’s nickname for him). What are you doing?”
Q. I disagree with the following: The runner noted that, “This course is very difficult.” Better: The runner noted that “this course is very difficult.” Why the comma in the first example? Why uppercase the “T”? Do you agree with me?
Q. Is it permissible to modify the verb tenses in a quotation to fit the grammatical and/or aesthetic structure of a sentence, presuming that the meaning of the original is not otherwise altered?
Q. In a dialogue tag after a question or an exclamation (e.g., “What did you say?” she asked), should the initial letter of the tag be capitalized (“What did you say?” She asked) or should it remain lowercase?
Q. We have a quotation from a book source, just two sentences, and the author has taken the first part of the quote from page 5 and the second part of the quote from page 4, and she includes a 4-dot ellipse in the middle to indicate missing text. How do we source that? Do we write “pages 4–5” in the note? Or perhaps “5, 4” to indicate that it’s out of order? I’m hoping you won’t tell me to do two different notes or rewrite . . . and that you won’t correct the run-on sentence above. (:
Q. How should text message conversations be styled within a story to distinguish them from normal dialogue? I already use italics for internal thoughts, and it might be confusing to use the same technique for text messages. I also use quotes with italics when a character is thinking about another person’s dialogue. Would reading a text message be akin to that? Or can I just make up something completely different (e.g., < how r u >)?
Q. We are using quotes from community leaders who have supported our project over the years. Last year the name of the project changed from the Trinity Uptown Project to the Panther Island Project, and we are updating all materials to reflect that. One of the quotes from a community leader (who is now deceased) uses the term “Trinity Uptown.” What would be the proper way to amend that to show that the project is now called Panther Island while the original quote used the term Trinity Uptown?
Q. I need help with the placement of double, single, double quotes in a short quotation (it can’t be an extract, which would solve the problem nicely). Here’s the sentence: “This book uses Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of concrescence as ‘the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one.”’” I feel like that last bit can’t possibly be correct: it’s double quotes around the last word (one), followed by the single quote mark that closes the inner quote, followed by the double quote mark that closes the outer quote. You say . . . ?
Q. Can you clarify when a comma should be used before a quote, especially following the word read or said? For example, “Newspaper headlines read, ‘People Are Angry’ and ‘Crime Abounds’” versus “Newspaper headlines read ‘People Are Angry’ and ‘Crime Abounds.’”
Q. In my dissertation, I cite a volume of letters in which the editor has inserted square brackets for clarification. So, for example, one passage reads: “Winston, Tito, Ben Gurion, Uncle Joe [Stalin], Bullitt, De Gaulle.” When I’m quoting the letter I’d like to add my own bracketed clarification to Bullitt’s name, but how do I distinguish it from the original editorial matter? CMOS specifies that I should clarify whether editorial insertions are original, but surely there is some method that would save me from having to specify the status of each individual bracket in footnotes.