Speech: Punctuation and Quotes

Still having some serious problems on punctuation and capitalization around quotes.

When a quote ends a sentence, followed by attribution, then the end of the quote gets a comma -- even if the quote was the source's spoken word -- and the attribution which follows is lower-case.

So if I say this:

"You guys rock."

Then this is how it should read:

"You guys rock," Omar said.

And this is NOT how it should read:

"You guys rock." Said Omar.

Also, general journalistic practice is to simply say said, even repeatedly and without having to come up with a different word for "said." I know it looks weird, having graf after graf with he said and she said and whomever said, but in journalism we just use said over and over and over again.

No matter how much I've been marking up people's papers with copy-editing symbols noting how it should be, it seems like the same mistakes are being made over and over.

Please made sure you are reading your returned papers and following my copy-editing marks as translated by the handout you got during the first few days of class.