I've reworked this sentence: The title page that read, "The Great War", smouldered before turning to flames. Making it so: The title page read, "The Great War". It smouldered before turning to flames. I prefer the first but feel the grammar's somehow off (pref. not to have surplus pronoun in the second). Punctuation correct on both accounts?
The page about the Great War caught fire. The punctuation of titles might depend on context and what dialect of English. It's an area where newspapers and academic journals (and I suppose publishers) may have style guides. I found this page, which is a style guide, but it looked good for US English generally:- https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Punctuating_Titles_chart.pdf The OP and this reply I think use " " and “ ” interchangeably. I'm British English but I think the only difference here is that we use single marks ' where US English uses the double ones ". (In my own writing I use the US convention for speech but would put a book or chapter title in Italics or GB English's single marks so that the double-mark is reserved for dialogue.) With those asides, there are some features of this construction ('oddities') that I think will probably make it too unusual to find definitive answers. The original options in the OP were 1. The title page that read, "The Great War", smouldered before turning to flames. 2. The title page read, "The Great War". It smouldered before turning to flames. The first oddity is that after 'read' there is also the option to use a colon. 3. The title page that read: "The Great War", smouldered before turning to flames. 4. The title page read: "The Great War". It smouldered before turning to flames. To me, 3 seems worse than 1, but 4 seems better than 2. A second oddity is that there's an open question whether the section title "The Great War" is really operating as a title when it is introduced by 'read'. If it's a title these might be some more options:- 5. The page titled "The Great War" smouldered before turning to flames. 5a. "The Great War" smouldered before turning to flames. 5b. The "Great War" page smouldered before turning to flames. 6. The page was titled "The Great War". It smouldered before turning to flames. A third oddity is that 'title page' might naturally be taken to refer to the title page of the whole book, rather than the section within it. If the whole book is titled "The Great War", that might produce:- 7. The title page, "The Great War", smouldered before turning to flames. Currently, on my reading, this circumstance is only precluded for the reader by the lack of a comma after page, and the use of quotation marks rather than italics. If so that's perhaps rather precise for the reader. And a fourth oddity is that 'read' is odd anyway as a passive-for-active, and with a very short quotation like "The Great War" it might start to sound active even with the comma after 'read'. Compare:- 1. The title page that read, "The Great War", smouldered before turning to flames. 8. The title page, that read, "The Great War: Heroes for all time as described by eye-witnesses", smouldered before turning to flames. Personally, I think these oddities demand a lot from the reader relative to the image's novelty value. There is a risk of becoming over-leveraged, or polishing turkeys.
You don't need the commas in either version, any of the comas. I also would change 'turning to flames' to something like 'burst into flame' or maybe flames. It doesn't seem technically right to say a page turns to flames or into flames. The paper doesn't actually become fire, but feeds it.
I prefer the first. No. In both samples, the final punctuation (the comma or the period, respectively) belongs inside the closing quotation mark, not after it. In both instances, you omitted a space following the punctuation mark.
Cheers @evild4ve for the comprehensive reply. I'm preferring 'titled' to 'read' (good call) as there's less room for ambiguity. It was good too to see your thinking process laid out. It's for a UK publication fwiw, if successful, so will go with the single quotation marks. If it was for US, I see there'd be the most likely expectation @SapereAude to have commas/periods inside the marks. Can of worms and my bad, hmm. @Xoic I like your compressed rewrite, but I'm wanting to convey a slow transition from smoulder to flame. It's a symbolic/slow drama moment. Burst, seems well... too instant, as would be ignited. Let's see.. turned to flame, became a flame, conflagrated, caught fire, lit up.. I'm struggling there. Anyway, in terms of structure only (and I'll use UK style), I want to nail this in case it visits me again in future, e.g. The road sign that read 'Glasgow — 5 miles' swayed in the gale. < Can't help but intuit there ought to be commas, but the longer I stare the more okay the sentence seems. What do yous reckon?
Here's how to keep your original. The title page that read "The Great War" smouldered before turning to flames. If what is in quotes is a grammatical part of the sentence, then you don't use commas around it. For example: The man who keeps shouting "All hands on deck!" is deranged. The quote above can be thought of as a direct object. The man keeps shouting X, where X is the object. And so there's no commas. Technically, the word who is interfering, but you get the idea. It has the feel of an object. Yes, you're right. It's for the same reason as above, so no commas. If your ear feels the need for a pause, then you can force it all into an appositive. That's just for the proper tension within the sentence. You might need to change the cadence by shifting the structure of the sentence. The title page, a fox-eared intro which named the book as "The Great War," smouldered before turning to flames. (Since this is about commas, I'd better qualify that I'm not a big believer in restrictive-which. I used it in the last example sentence. It's one of the 19th century's pseudo rules. It's a brother to the infamous "don't end with a preposition," but for some reason hasn't been dismissed as academic meddling in the language. In professional fiction Brits often ignore it. Americans do too, just not as frequently. So it's not much of a rule.)
Muchos thanks @Seven Crowns , I gets my standard + the XL version, something mundane you've wrought into a great hook.
I didn't mean you should remove smoulder, but just replace turned to flames with burst into flames. Or if you want it downplayed more, it could be 'before flames sprouted from it'. OK, that sounds strange. You could play around a little with imagery, like '... smouldered for a few moments and then dissipated in a lick of pale flame.' Or something similar.
Oo, I'm there, I think, one for the vivimagery-bank, it's kind of kissy ... smouldered before being taken by the lick of a flame.
So that I don't forget some intended examples or muddy my thinking on what appears to me a straightforward choice, I'm writing this before I read other replies. And I'm not getting into style; this answer is about the narrow question of punctuation. The comma you're inclined to put before The Great War (which should be in italics or quotation marks, but not both) is a dialogue comma, not a quotation comma. The feeling that you need it is an artifact of dialogue — and secondarily of an antiquated practice regarding names. The first sentence is almost fine if you delete both commas. My other quibble with it is that you have doubly restricted the page, describing it both as the (one and only) title page and as the (presumably one and only) page that read The Great War. It's possibly a borderline case, but double restriction of that type (using a uniquely identifying adjective/appositive together with a relative pronoun like that / which / who with no comma before it) does bother some ears. I realize there's a raging controversy in WF about the use of italics, and I don't intend to wade into it. As an editor (and writer), I use italics for titles (plus some other things) in non-technical pieces, and as a reader, I most often see titles in italics. But I don't really care, and it doesn't affect the answer here. Rather than citing rules, I'm going to cite related examples. I think most people find examples easier to understand, absorb, and apply than rules and grammatical names for things. Also, many supposed rules about punctuation are mushy — and much ignored in editorial precedent. These first few examples use a different sense of "read," but that does not change anything. (1) I first read The Godfather in the eighth grade. Surely you'd never even consider a comma here. (2) The author will read The Great War for an invited audience on Saturday, November 11. (3) The author will read his novel The Great War for an invited audience on Saturday, November 11. If it's the author's only novel, this one could go either way, with two somewhat distinct meanings: as an instance of (2) or of (4). Simplicity of punctuation should usually govern. Personally, I would rarely insert commas here. If it's not his only novel, the commas must be omitted. (4) The author will read his latest novel, The Great War, for an invited audience on Saturday, November 11. Technically, yes. But you wouldn't be pilloried in the NYTBR for omitting these commas, either. And as Anne Stilman notes in her Grammatically Correct, the fact that one might speak a sentence with a slight pause or down-inflection at certain points does not mean one must or even should reflect those points with commas in writing it. (5) The page labeled The Great War smoldered before turning to flames. I hope you would have no impulse to put a comma after labeled — therefore not after that read, either. No more would I write: comma after,[x] "labeled" — but using italics instead of quotation marks makes it even clearer you should not use commas. A weak argument for commas could be made based on the notion that quotation marks are direct quotation akin to direct dialogue. Italics clearly indicate indirect quotation. That by itself, and the way that removing the commas improves the flow of an otherwise awkward sentence, is reason enough to use italics for the words of the title. (I hate to mention that in certain circumstances akin to (4), namely with a clearly known specific page already under discussion, there would be a comma after "page" [not after "labeled"] and "War" — if and only if we did not already know it was so labeled. I.e. The page, [which was] labeled The Great War, smoldered etc. That special case does not come close to applying here.) On a related matter, John brought his brother Rick along to the reception is standard modern punctuation. There should be a special reason to put exceptional emphasis on Rick's name by setting it off between commas. Doing so introduces a major hiccup, not to say stumble, in the flow. One immediately asks why, and there's usually no sufficient reason. You'll find convoluted (and contradictory) advice on name-commas in various places, but routinely putting commas around Rick in a sentence like this sounds either fastidious or fusty — or both. I mostly see it done by youngish online editors who had to look it up somewhere because their ear didn't give them a clear answer regarding modern prose. With some forgivable ambiguity, you could consider: The title page smoldered [browned?] and curled before The Great War burst into flames. But I don't want to get into the business of making stylistic recommendations, least of all for a context unknown.
I'm not familiar with this as an explicit principle, though the conclusions appear correct. Can you point me to a source that discusses it in these terms? I also don't understand in what manner the word who technically interferes. Among... The man who keeps shouting "All hands on deck!" is deranged. The man shouting "All hands on deck!" is deranged. Shouting "All hands on deck!" is deranged. ... which are structurally somewhat different, how would such differences potentially interfere with the principle of not using commas around the thing shouted? And in The man shouted, "All hands on deck!", is "All hands on deck!" not the object of this sentence? I realize you're onto something, and I just want to get a better understanding of what it is. And a question about your "restrictive which" observation will follow shortly.
Can you clarify that comment for me as well? Given these three examples... (1) The man selected the first hat, which fit him perfectly. (2) The man selected the first hat which fit him perfectly. (3) The man selected the first hat that fit him perfectly. ... the difference in meaning between (1) and the other two shows the significance of the comma with most relative pronouns. In (1), the comma makes which additive, adding information about a hat that is already uniquely identified. In (2), the absence of comma makes which subtractive / restrictive, reducing the world of several hats to the single one the man chose for fitting him perfectly. . And (3) is the way I would probably always write (2) unless by accident. Is that what you mean when you say you're not a big believer in restrictive-which?
By "interfere" I just meant that I made the sentence more complicated than I should have to serve as my example. Maybe this would have been more direct: The man shouted "All hands on deck!" and fired his pistol. And your examples were fine too. The point is that the dialog is mixed into the narration. It's an integral part of it and isn't offset with commas. If it was just normal dialog (X shouted, "Y!") then off course it gets a comma. As to which source it's from . . . that's very tough. I have a lot of writing books. The thing is, I know I bought one of them just because I saw this issue mentioned in it, but I can't remember which book it is. If it comes to me, I'll post it. . . . Your other question. I've probably read it online, though I'm pretty sure it's in my books too. Text analyzing has been done on professional fiction, and restrictive-which just tends to get ignored. Not most of the time, but a good percentage of it. I know it's taught in school as if it's sacrosanct, but it's not. I believe what I read was that Americans ignore it about 20% of the time, and Brits ignore it somewhere in the 40% range. It seems like it was close to 50% even, which means it's not a grammar rule at all for them. The one statistic that was found to be true (and closer to a valid rule) is that "non-restrictive that" doesn't exist. For example: I own the car, that has a dented fender. (always wrong, non-restrictive that) I own the car that has a dented fender. (obviously right) I own the car which has a dented fender. (your grade school teacher hates it, but publishers do not) I know Chicago Manual 17 points out that Brits often ignore the that/which distinction. They suggest that Americans follow the distinction, but what can I say? I've seen other publications say that it doesn't matter so much (other than the example above). Let's see if I can find one real quick . . . (time passes) Okay, I know I've got it in my books, but this is taking too long. Here's Merriam Webster's talking on the same subject. They even sound a lot like me. I'm just posting this so that everything's here for reading. I'm not trying to be dramatic. (excerpt) It has been pointed out that if most of your language’s writers do not follow a rule (and the best writers seem to disregard it as well) then you may have to accept that it’s not much of a rule. Another issue with the Fowler’s dicta is that if you say that your rule can be ignored for reasons of “custom, euphony, or convenience”, it would appear to be more of a mild suggestion than a rule. . . . We conclude that at the end of the 20th century, the usage of which and that—at least in prose—has pretty much settled down. You can use either which or that to introduce a restrictive clause—the grounds for your choice should be stylistic—and which to introduce a nonrestrictive clause.
Thanks too @Also, I read your post a couple of times over + replies and appreciated/gained a fair bit from such. Choosing to use italics for thoughts in my wider piece partly led to this query as I felt I'd blocked off the option when compiling the sentence. That's not to say I'd not have placed commas either side of the quotation anyhow As you say, it's a convoluted and contradictory world out there. Good bearings are hard to come by.
