Should a stutter at the start of a sentence retain the capital letter?

Question

When writing dialogue for characters that stammer or stutter over the first letter of the first word in their speech, should the first letter remain a capital or become lowercase when repeated?

My question is probably best explained by example...

Retaining capital letter:

"H-H-Hello," he said.

Not retaining capital letter:

"H-h-hello," he said.

Which is correct, or are both acceptable? I wasn't able to find any solid information either way so I thought a discussion could be had in the hopes of reaching a concrete conclusion.

To be entirely clear, I'm only asking about stammering over the first letter and when that first letter should be a capital.

Answer 1

I'd stick with the upper case letters. And that doesn't mean you need to use upper case for a stutter all the time. If the stutter starts on a lower case letter then keep it lower case. For example,

I d-don't like that. But if it was I, the I'd use I-I...

That said, I think it' a bad idea to repeat the same letter again and again. It'd be going too much over the top and your reader won't like it. I'd probably stick to a single repetition.

Answer 2

Actually, the second letter does not get capitalized if it's an ordinary word. It would be H-h-hello. As for the word I, since I is a full word, then it would be I--I, with an em-dash between the Is, not two hyphens. The exception is a proper name. H-H-Henry will not be joining us.