I’M GOING TO GIVE HIM A SUMMER’S PAY SAID SHARON, WHO HAD A COPY OF...

30.I’m going to give him A Summer’s Pay said Sharon, who had a copy of the poem in herbag. (The embedded quotation here is actually a poem title, A Summer’s Pay. Poem titles,as I explain in the next section, belong in quotation marks. Treat the title like any otherembedded quotation.)

Punctuating Titles

Punctuating titles is easy, especially if you’re a sports fan. Imagine a basketball player,one who tops seven feet. Next to him place a jockey; most jockeys hover around fivefeet. Got the picture? Good. When you’re deciding how to punctuate a title, figure outwhether you’re dealing with Yao Ming (NBA player) or Mike Smith (Derby rider), usingtheses rules:⻬Titles that are italicized or underlined:The basketball player represents full-length works — novels, magazines, television series, plays, epic poems, films,and the like. The titles of those works are italicized or underlined.⻬Titles that are placed in quotation marks:The jockey, on the other hand, repre-sents smaller works or parts of a whole — a poem, a short story, a single episodeof a television show, a song, an article — you get the idea. The titles of theselittle guys aren’t italicized or underlined; they’re placed in quotation marks.Okay, I admit that my sports comparison falls apart in one case: Pamphlets, whichcan be short, fall into the underlined-title category because regardless of length,they’re still considered full-length works.These rules apply to titles that are tucked into sentences. Centered titles, all alone atthe top of a page, don’t get any special treatment: no italics, no underlining, and no quo-tation marks. The centering and placement are enough to call attention to the title, sonothing else is called for, unless the centered title refers to some other literary work. Inthat case the embedded title is punctuated as described in the previous bulleted list.When a title in quotation marks is part of a sentence, it sometimes tangles with otherpunctuation marks. The rules in American English (British English is different) call forany commas or periods afterthe title to be placed insidethe quotation marks. So ifthe title is the last thing in the sentence, the period of the sentence comes before theclosing quotation mark. Question marks and exclamation points, on the other hand,don’t go inside the quotation marks unless they are actually part of the title. Forexample, suppose you write a poem and call it “Why Is the Sky Blue Again?” becauseyou can’t stop wondering why the sky isn’t green. The question mark must alwaysappear inside the closing quotation mark because it’s part of the title.If a title that ends with a question mark is the last thing in a sentence, the questionmark ends the sentence. Don’t place both a period and a question mark at the end ofthe same sentence.All set for a practice lap around the track? Check out the title in this series of sen-tences. Place quotation marks around the title if necessary, adding endmarks whennecessary; otherwise, underline the title. Here and there you find parentheses at theend of a sentence, in which I add some information to help you.

Q.

Have you read Sarah’s latest poem, Sonnet for the Tax Assessor (The sentence is a ques-tion, but the title isn’t.)

A.

Have you read Sarah’s latest poem, “Sonnet for the Tax Assessor”? The title of a poemtakes quotation marks. Question marks never go inside the quotation marks unless thetitle itself is a question.