quote:He said that "this is the worst pizza ever."
Since this is an indirect statement, the quotations shouldn't be in there at all. If you are going to quote a full sentence, then set it up as a quote, but if you are going to use an indirect statement, don't use quotation marks.
It's not an indirect statement. Perhaps it wasn't the best example, but that doesn't mean that you can't run a quote in to the sentence.
Getting back to the important part of this thread ...
I would still use quotes with statements included in a sentence if it was important that the reader knew those words were actually spoken by the person in question.
"Pearson said it was the worst show ever." "Pearson said it was the 'worst show ever.'"
The second one arguably has more emphasis as it makes clear he used those exact words, where the first could have been the speaker's interpretation.
Still no comma, though...
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:He said that "this is the worst pizza ever."
That still makes the above sentence bad style, because there is no reason to emphasize that "this is the" is also part of the direct quote. If you want to quote the entire sentence, then don't set up an indirect statement. If you want to set up an indirect statement, then only put quotes around the significant words.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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(Buffy changed forever the way I think about vocabulary (I believed in flexible vocabularies already, thanks to Shakespeare, but Buffy set it free). My favorite use of a new word was "sorrowfied" in an email the other day. It rhymes with "horrorified".)
I mean, you knew what I meant, right? Plus it paralleled "grammatical", which made me happy.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
I'm not quite at the point where I'm comfortable making words up, but I have certainly had my brain fire up a neuron for a word that fit exactly with what I wanted to say, only to check a dictionary to find the word doesn't exist.
Maybe, one day, I'll make that leap.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Having checked the OED, it used to be a word. It just isn't used anymore - OED's last recording is 1839. That makes sense/is sensical.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
So it used to be a word that was used fairly commonly but then fell out of favor, and some 150+ years later you essentially made it up out of whole cloth, as far as you knew until you checked the OED.
posted
When you say, "That's just crazypants. " I'm absolutely picturing a pic of your cat right next to it.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Oh, dear! I'd never seen that, CT, and when I watched it just now I was sitting in a restaurant watching on my phone waiting for food. Initially I was embarrassed despite my laughter and then I figured it's funny and put my hands down and enjoyed my strange looks, heh.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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