Is this sentence punctuated correctly?

Question

Is this quote punctuated correctly:

"Get off me!" she shrieked playfully, trying faintly to wriggle out of his grip.

I am confused if the S in SHE needs to be capitalized or not.

Also, is this quote punctuated correctly:

"Okay!" he said, raising his hands in surrender, " I get the gist now. We shouldn't see each other tomorrow. It would be way too dangerous."

I am having trouble understanding when to capitalize with quotes in my novella. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The first sentence looks fine. It is capitalized correctly. The second one is also good but I would change the comma to a period and write it:

"Okay!" he said, raising his hands in surrender. "I get the gist now. We shouldn't see each other tomorrow. It would be way too dangerous."

I think if you were to use a comma between surrender and gist it would look more like:

"Okay!" he said while raising his hands in surrender, "I get the..."

But honestly in a novella you can take some creative liberties as long as they're consistent and intentional. This is the kind of thing teachers love to punish student's grades for while they praise accomplished authors like William Faulkner, James Joyce, et al.

Answer 2

You don't need to capitalize "she" or "he" in these cases. Just because the parts in quotes use exclamation marks, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to end your sentence there. In such cases, the exclamation is dependent on the rest of the sentence; "Get off me!" is the object of "shrieked," and "Okay!" is the object of "said." If you capitalized "she" in the first sentence, it would change the meaning so that she said, "Get off me!" and then shrieked inarticulately, rather than said "Get off me!" in a shrill voice.

So, with that said, your first quotation is punctuated completely correctly. Your second quotation has a couple errors though, but not with capitalization. The main one is that you should put a period after "surrender" instead of a comma. Also, be careful not to put spaces between quotation marks and the words inside them. Overall, though, you're good.