I’ll say it first: I’m a nerd. I got so excited about seeing an unusual sentence construction that I had to share it with you.
This wonderful capital letter in the middle of a sentence is perfectly correct; you just don’t see it too often. In case you can’t read the scanned image, the sentence reads “But for me as a critic and you as a viewer, the question is, Are there better shows on TV?”
I wrote about that kind of construction on the Grammar Girl blog. The funny thing is that I didn’t much care for it when I wrote about it, but I’m tickled pink to see it in print.
Thanks to Jamie Poniewozik for writing that odd sentence in his April 6, 2009, Time article, “Here’s to the Death of Broadcast.”
I’d rather see a colon there, But nobody cares what I think.
I wouldn’t look twice at a construction like this if it have quotation marks around the question, which would seem to be a correct alternative, given the author is writing what amounts to dialog.
I would have expected to see single quotes around the question. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable using this format, but it’s nice to see an alternative.
I would not have questioned the capital, but maybe I would have been looking for a colon instead of a comma? I better go read your link. Thanks GG!
wow. i love that! very hot.
You’d have to change the sentence a bit to use a colon because a colon has to go after something that could be a complete sentence on its own.
So you could add “this” and then write the sentence with a colon.
But for me as a critic and you as a viewer, the question is this: Are there better shows on TV?
I have a question about the sentence after the subject sentence of your post. After looking the scanned image, the next sentence starts with, “More important, the answer is…” Should that be “More importantly,…”?