quotation marks

Jamesaritchie

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I'm seeing books with and without them for dialogue. It looks less cluttered to omit them, but it gets confusing. And if so, ' or "

You aren't looking at many books, and I've never seen one that didn't have dialogue indicators. At least ninety-nine point some of novels use quotation marks, the rest try to be artsy-fartsy and use a dash for quotation marks, like Cold Mountain.

Someone correct me on this, but I think this is French.

Just don't do it. No one wants to read fiction without quotation marks, and even though Cold Mountain was a success, no book has ever has as many complaints about formatting as that one.
 

blacbird

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I'm seeing books with and without them for dialogue. It looks less cluttered to omit them, but it gets confusing.

Yup.

Cormac McCarthy gets away without using them, mainly because he's a great wordsmith (and reclusive iconoclast, perhaps), but, like JAR, I really don't see any good reason not to use them.

Now, there are different punctuational/typographical conventions in other nations (e.g., France, South Africa). In the U.K. they like single "inverted commas" rather than the double-symbol quotation mark conventional in the U.S.

But, beyond those things, I generally see things like omission of quotation marks in dialogue as pretentious preciosity, and it pisses me off. I don't think Cold Mountain is a very good novel, and the lack of standard punctuation int he matter of punctuation didn't make me feel any better about it.

caw
 

eyeblink

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I have read novels and stories which use quotation marks but do without them or use something different (en dashes, italics) for particular types of dialogue. It's fairly standard not to use quotes for direct thoughts, for example, either with or without italics.

In Invincible Summer, Hannah Moskowitz (who used to post on AW as Shady Lane) has a deaf character and dialogue in sign language is rendered in bold.

In two novels I've read (Christopher Priest's The Separation and Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia) dialogue which is not in the main language of the book's dialogue has square brackets inside the quotation marks. In the Priest, the characters mostly speak English but German dialogue gets the square brackets. In the Roberts, the main characters are Russian, but when characters speak English, the square brackets come out, to intended ironic effect.
 
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BethS

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As an American, I've noticed that the combination of single quotes and serif fonts sometimes causes me to miss the opening quotation mark when I'm reading a UK edition of a book. Especially when it precedes a capital "T", it seems to blend in with the letter.

I tend to miss single quotes even when they're not at the beginning of a chapter. My eyes often just don't register them, or think they're a stray apostrophe. This makes reading UK-published novels (the ones that use single quotes) something of a pain. Give me double quotes any day.
 

Schnurri

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This has been a very interesting thread, as I've been wondering whether to use double or single quotation marks for my WIP. Just to add the the confusion: I've read a number of books using >> and <<.