<p>I am reviewing a fellowship application for one of my students and I am not sure about the commas and quotation marks here. This is what the student wrote:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think this is probably correct but I am having to think about:</p>
<ol>
<li>Should “Introduction to Religious Studies" be in quotation marks or not?</li>
<li>Should there be a comma after the word was in the first sentence – so should it be: My first class as a college freshman was, “Introduction to Religious Studies.”</li>
<li>Should there NOT be a comma after the word was in the second sentence – so should it be: The first thing the professor said in that class was “XYZ [specific quote deleted to protect privacy].”</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li> No quotations marks for the name of the class. </li>
<li> No comma.</li>
<li> Is XYX the person to whom the professor is speaking? If so, there is a comma after XYZ. If it’s just the comment, no comma after XYZ. Definitely a comma before the quote.</li>
</ol>
<p>re: #3 I was always taught that you needed to put a comma before someone begins to speak in direct quotes. So, that looks right to my naked eye. </p>
<ol>
<li>No quote marks necessary. Why? Because the capital letters signify the name clearly. </li>
<li>No comma. Why? Because there is nothing to signify, meaning the title is part of the sentence clause.</li>
<li>Either way. Why? In the old days, switching to speech was treated as a shift requiring a signifier, meaning a comma, so you wouldn’t be confused about what was happening. That started to go out in the Modernist Era when writers started not using their own punctuation, and academics shifted some decades later. The issue is whether a comma adds meaning. In some cases, you see a comma, in others none and in others you might see a colon. A colon might appear, for example, if the spoken words are a list and it is added to convey “hey, this is a list”. I sometimes use a comma and sometimes not.</li>
</ol>
<p>I’d do a little formatting. Put the title of the course in initial caps with italics. No quotation marks.
I would rewrite the sentence about “the first thing the professor said” to something a bit more active. Perhaps “as we settled into our seats, the professor said “XYZ” and I immediately sat up straighter, startled.”</p>
<p>Quotation marks were formerly used in some cases because typewriters don’t have italics. But word processors do. I’d italicize the name of the class. No comma for the first sentence. Yes comma for the second sentence. So for example:</p>
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</p>
<p>I don’t like the repetition of the word first, though. I’d recast.</p>
<p>It’s easy enough to Google this stuff. I checked a number of authorities, and they all agreed that course names should be formatted only with initial caps. No quotation marks or italics. This is also the only way I’ve ever seen course names formatted in intercampus documents, documents exchanged between institutions in my state, and documents from my state board of regents.</p>
<p>As others have noted, citation forms were developed in typewriter, monospaced font days. You’d put quote marks around periodical titles and would underline book titles - by backing up the carriage and typing underscores. In law school submissions, you had to worry about whether you’d underscore the spaces between words, though I never saw a court that cared. (Courts did and do care about line length, space between lines and number of pages and will sometimes toss briefs that cram in more than allowed - or will tear off the excess pages.) </p>
<p>Think about that even with the comma before spoken words: all the letters are the same distance apart so the comma acts as a notice, a signifier that the quote is beginning. That is important because a typewriter makes straight quotes, not curled ones that indicate to the reader the quote’s beginning or end. The comma means you know this is the beginning. So you should use a comma if you aren’t using curled quote marks because that tells the reader this is the start of the quotation. </p>