On Jul 15, 5:09*am, The DixieFlatline
wrote:
My schooling was many years ago, but I did come away with an o-level in

Aha! You're in the Eastern Hemisphere! (Then why call yourself
"Dixie"?)

English Language. One thing we were taught was that there's times and places
when absolutely correct speech is needed, and others when insistance on it
was merely pedantry. (Polite cough.)

It's odd to have encountered that enlightened attitude "many years
ago" -- unless your use of "many" is a lot smaller than mine! There
was a huge furore over here when the "descriptivist" Third
International Dictionary was publlished by Merriam-Webster in 1961.

Yes, I know there's cases where it is/isn't capitalized, but it's _always_
capitalized after a full stop, exclamation- or question-mark, which is why I
wondered whether I'd missed something in settings to turn it on; it seemed a
small point.

It's easier to type a capital than to uncapitalize a wrongly
capitalized letter.

I've tried to learn the old ten-finger business, but I'm afraid too many
years of bad habits have got in the way. My ten finger typing is ever worse,
and slower than, my two finger typing lol

It just takes a little practice (using basic exercises).

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
Curious. When and where was your school?

I can certainly come up with examples where the first word inside the
quotation marks is capitalized even if the quotation doesn't follow a
period (or question mark or exclamation point).

It really isn't hard to tearn to type with ten fingers. Any secondhand
bookstore will have old typing manuals (you don't need a computer
program!), and if you practice the first few lessons for maybe 20
minutes a day, over a week or so, you'll be amazed what you can
accomplish. (Don't be frightened by how thick the book is -- mostly
they're teaching secretaries how to format business letters and such.)

On Jul 14, 10:02 pm, The DixieFlatline
wrote:
If it follows a full stop, it's a new sentence. I know it's only a slight
annoyance, but with my slow two-fingered typing any aid is a comfort. BTW I
was taught at school that the terms "speech mark" and "quotation mark" are
interchangeable; one is technical usage, the other more informal.

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
"It would be impossible," Peter might have written, "for a mere word
processing program to determine when and when not to capitalize a
letter after a quotation mark." I used the word "impossible" once in
that sentence.

On Jul 14, 8:01 am, "Stefan Blom"
wrote:
The auto capitalization (apparently) cannot deal with all possible
situations. But, as Peter wrote, since you have to press Shift anyway to
insert the quotation mark, manual capitalization will be very easy in this
case.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

"The DixieFlatline" The wrote in
...

I've noticed that in Word, if a sentence starts with a speech mark, ie
"How
are you?" *Word will not capitalize the first letter of the sentence. Is
there a way to make it do so?---