What's the correct way to punctuate this? It's a thought followed by a beat, but the thought is a question. Why did it bother him so much? he thought as he bla bla bla bla This looks the cleanest way, but a question mark ends a sentence, right? So the following word should start with a capital letter.
"Why did it bother him so much?" he thought as he bla bla bla bla Dialogue has its own rules for puntuation. Since the "he thought" is part of the same sentence, there is no cap.
I would skip the thought attribute altogether. The italics mark it as such and it can stand alone with no need for the "he thought" filter. The purpose of italicized thought quotes is eliminate the need for filters.
@Laurus - it's not dialogue but are you saying the same rule applies? @Homer Potvin - it's only in italics here to make it stand out from the rest of the post. If italics for thought is standard, then fair enough. Any road, it's academic now as it's been changed to: He grabbed a box of last night's yakisoba noodles from the fridge and wondered why his meeting with Petersen bothered him so much.
Italics for thoughts are not standard but skipping the thought attribute when they are italicized is... more or less.
Thoughts are generally considered a form of dialogue called Internal Dialogue. "He thought" and "I thought" are dialogue tags. Italics can be used to indicate thoughts, but they can be used to indicate other types of things well, like emphasis. If you're using lots if internal dialogue and you want people to know right away that it's internal, then go with italics to avoid confusion, but that's more of a style choice. With what you presented, @Laurus has it right.
Surely not the speech marks? I've seen italics for thoughts, sure enough, but I'm not sure I've ever seen speech marks for thoughts.
To be fair, I misread the OP. Since it's for thought, I'd drop the tags and "he said," whatever that's called. If it was spoken dialogue, then I'd stand by what I said. Sorry, that was my mistake.
They used single quotes for thoughts back in the day, I believe. I'm guessing that was before italics were common in the typeset.
I shit you not, you can use either. Again though, it's a style choice, and really only one you have to make when writing in 3rd person. It depends on your writing style. If I find I'm writing a lot of internal dialogue with a third person limited, then I usually just switch to first person because it makes such things easier. If you're mixing lots of speech and internal dialogue, you might want to go italics for thought and quotation marks for speech. "Are you sure you know where we're going?" Ralph called to Jones, because I swear we've walked past that rock three times already. Versus: "Are you sure you know where we're going?" Ralph called to Jones; internally adding, "because I swear we've walked past that rock three times already." You just have to make sure that you have a tag that indicates it's internal. If you don't use internals frequently then it might be easier to use quotation marks because just having randomly italicized phrases ever so often can also be confusing and you'd have to tag them anyway. You can use any style, and can even make up your own, as long as it's clear to the reader what's going on. And once you choose that style, stick to it throughout your story. But as for what you've given us, quotation marks work best because even italicized, the first sentence looks like it ends with the question mark whereas with the quotations around them it doesn't. Therefore it's less confusing to the reader since your sentence obviously does not end there.
This also works. As far as I can tell, italics for thoughts only seems to have gotten popular when sci-fi started using it for telepathy conversations. There are also books that use single quotes for regular conversations as well. The Chrysalids by John Windham is one I have. It's also a decent example of a book that mixes thoughts, dialogue, and telepathy all using quotation marks and it's only like 200 pages long.
My style for thoughts is definitely italics, no speech marks. And I use them very infrequently anyway. Anyway, my original question about the cap/no cap after the question mark has been answered now.
