This has been bothering me for some time. With direct speech coming after commas in dialogue (preceded by action) should the first letter be capitalised or lower case?

Two examples:

Eventually he sighed and lifted the lid of the box, saying, ‘look at this.’

He leapt up and shouted, ‘get away from that!’

I’ve got around the problem in the past by using different sentence construction but it seems to me a useful dialogue tool.

Any thoughts?

Michael

It's capitalised. I think the logic is that what the speaker's saying is the beginning of a sentence, even though it's also part of a larger one that includes the action.

But quite often (not always) you can leave out the 'saying' or 'shouted' anyway, which is no bad thing.

Emma

Thanks Emma

I had an feeling it was a capital.