15) I was stuck with so many needles that Shannon laughed and said, Now you understand what it feels like to be me!"
What change should be made in sentence 15?
A. Insert a colon after stuck
B. Change that to then
C. Delete the comma
D. Insert the quotation marks before Now
I chose D.
Right
Your answer, D. Insert the quotation marks before "Now," is incorrect.
The correct change that should be made in sentence 15 is A. Insert a colon after "stuck."
This is because the sentence follows the pattern of a dialogue attribution where a character's speech is introduced by a comma and then followed by a tag verb (e.g., said, exclaimed, whispered) or an action beat to attribute the speech to the character. However, in this case, the sentence doesn't follow that pattern as it uses a colon to introduce Shannon's dialogue. Using a colon before the dialogue correctly punctuates the sentence and helps differentiate between the narrator's action (being stuck with needles) and Shannon's speech.
So the corrected sentence would be:
I was stuck with so many needles that Shannon laughed and said: "Now you understand what it feels like to be me!"