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This is an example of something I've run into:

I felt my excitement grow at the view, with “now THIS is a true alien world!” running through my mind.

Should the "n" in "now" be capitalized here or not?

Other examples I've seen don't address this since they either occur at the start of the sentence or have "I" at the beginning of the thought.

Thank you!

J W
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  • This belongs on English SE, so voting to migrate it there. – Sciborg Aug 16 '20 at 23:34
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    @Sciborg This definitely shouldn't be migrated to English. This is only about style, not grammar, and it's as much on topic here as it is there. Migrating it is a waste of time, since it's just as useful here as it is there. – Jason Bassford Aug 17 '20 at 00:10
  • I actually put the first example text into italics because you said that it was (it wasn't). I left the rest alone, because there was no mention of italics having been used with them. If you thought they should be in italics, you should do that. – Jason Bassford Aug 17 '20 at 00:13
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    Note that this actually asks two different questions: one is about the styling or punctuation to use, and the other is about capitalization. (I don't know where the third fits into that.) If you want more than just one question answered, you should split this up into individual questions. Since this asks about styling first, that's the only thing I've focused on. – Jason Bassford Aug 17 '20 at 00:20
  • Putting "this" is all caps should be taken into account when deciding whether "now: should be capitalized. Putting a word in all caps for emphasis makes many gleefully unhappy (teenwrite) , but if you've done that, lowercasing a preceding word usually uppercased would likely make them wonder if you're doing something stylistically sophisticated. Best to leave them guessing. Don't cap now. – Zan700 Aug 18 '20 at 23:59

1 Answers1

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Capitalize it.

It's the start of an internal, quoted sentence. No different from this:

Joe looked at me and said, "How are you doing?"

For the sentence itself, I might split it like this (or edit further to put it in italics and take out the "dialogue" tag), but up to you!

I felt my excitement grow at the view. "Now THIS is a true alien world!” ran through my mind.

Kitkat
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