Punctuating dialog

Consider this:

“Shall I cut away the protruding area for you?” offered Bergen.

or is it:

“Shall I cut away the protruding area for you?” Offered Bergen.

In the first, offered Bergen begins with lower case o, but is not preceded by a comma, because it needs a question mark.

In the second, the quote ends with ? rather than pausing with a comma, and so Offered is capped. But it is not a complete sentence.

It’s the first according to the style guides I’m familiar with (AP Style, Chicago Manual of Style).

Lowercase. “offered Bergen” is not a sentence. Using a cap there just seems very very wrong.

I’ll even give you the AP style entry:

(And, stylistically, I’m not a big fan of the word “offered” there, but that’s your choice.)

I really like the Spanish style of marking questions at the beginning and end, with ¿ . . . ?

First, you might have a really long sentence that is a question, and not realize that it’s a question until you’re half-way through reading it, or all the way, and then you have to start reading it over from the beginning to re-parse it as a question. With the ¿ at the beginning, the reader is advised up front that a question is coming.

Second, and more directly relevant to this OP’s question, is that a question may be only part of a sentence. The ¿ . . . ? punctuation marks unambiguously just what part of the sentence is the question. Example: Now I ask you, ¿what kind of a punctuation style is that?

I wouldn’t mind it at all if we were to adopt the Spanish style of question marks for regular use in English. ¿What would you think of that?

I’d think I’d have to throw out my typewriter.

You still use a typewriter?

IIRC, I saw a typewriter once that had a slot for a custom character. The type bar had no built-in type face on the end of it, but instead it had a clip-on type face character. That could be removed and another clip-on type face put on. There was a blank key on the keyboard (like the blank tile in Scrabble). I suppose there were various extra characters you could buy to clip on.