Comma or full-stop

by Hwee-Ping Ong
(Singapore)

I would like your expert opinion on the paragraph below from my son's English worksheet on punctuation exercise.

Quote:

"Sorry, do I know you?" the woman was a little surprised by Robyn's reaction (2) "Oh! You are Robyn Rodino! How are you? We haven't seen each other for over twenty years!"

Unquote

The choices given for (2) are:
1) , comma
2) . full-stop

Which should be correct? I'm strongly for choice 2, but my son's teacher told the class that it should be choice 1, since it's the same person talking again.

Hope to hear any explanations that you may have on this.

ANSWER

Hwee-Ping, I'm not clear which sentence had the choice of comma or full stop, as I see neither a comma nor a period in part 2, but I can tell you how I would punctuate these sentences.

As this dialogue is spoken by a single person, I would leave it all as one paragraph, as you have shown it. I would capitalize "the" as the first word of the second sentence, and would put a period after "reaction."

I would also remove at least two exclamation marks in part 2, as the woman's surprise is both told in the second sentence, shown by "Oh!" in the third sentence, and is evident by what she says.

I'd also make a contraction of "you are" because in speech we rarely use the full words. So my version would be as follows:

"Sorry, do I know you?" The woman was a little surprised by Robyn's reaction. "Oh! You're Robyn Rodino. How are you? We haven't seen each other for over twenty years."