when to capitalize quotations

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

If you're quoting directly, the first word should be capitalized:

Jeff Harris said, "I don't know what I was on."


If you break up the quote, the first word of the second part is lowercase:
"Why that show Diff'rent Strokes was so popular, I have no clue," said Harris, "and it's an even greater mystery that The Facts of Life had a longer run."


Now, say the quote syntactically depends on the sentence it's in, in that case, the first word in the quote is lowercase:
Just like in real life, "we took the good, we took the bad."

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