The Mechanics

In my grammar book Collins Good Grammar, Graham King has created a test and one of the questions is this:

Which sentence is correct:

Then, as he lay silently beside her she cried: A broken, hoarse cry that sprang from a buried memory of adolescence.

Then, as he lay silently beside her she cried: a broken, hoarse cry that sprang from a buried memory of adolescence.

Graham King claims that the second sentence is correct because a colon is not a full stop therefore a capital 'A' is not necessary. I agree that a colon is not a full stop but an argument can be made for the capital nonetheless.

I like to upper case letters after a colon when emphasis is in order. In this case the emotions that are coming from her are raw and integral to the meaning of the sentence so I would upper case the 'A' as in example one.

I'm not really concerned that Graham King would have marked my response wrong.

When I worked at the high tech firm downtown I used to upper case after colons too and another editor always lower cased them.

Did that stop me from upper casing them? Not once. If I'd had his position they would have all been left upper cased.

Such is life!