How to Avoid Looking Like an Amateur when You Quote Dialog
Italics, quotes, and bold, oh my!
Today—a visit from the Grammar Police. Reference tips to bookmark.
Dialog brings any story to life. If you want to confuse the hell out of readers, haphazard delineation of dialog does it every time. When you make a reader aware of the mechanics of your stories, you lose traction and risk them clicking away.
If you call attention to how you're formatting something, the valuable idea you wanted to convey lays there, dead. Consistent formatting can avoid the early demise of your work. Let's consider quotation marks and some of their iterations.
The Owl at Purdue University says, "The primary function of quotation marks is to set off and represent exact language (either spoken or written) that has come from somebody else."
Those elevated, high-flying comma symbols are meant to be a subtle signal to readers that someone is speaking. They're not decorations.
Standards and conventions for using quotation marks
First, rules differ from country to country and language to language. My goal is to explain simple, workable rules useful for writing online—a kind of international convention. Yes, I know you learned differently in different schools, but you're trusting me to help you make your writing monetizable, so here it is.
Place titles of short works in quotes—names of articles, songs, poems, music works, episodes, chapters, and short stories. Website names are usually not in quotes. In today's world, titles of longer works like books and movies are put in italics, as are names of planes, trains, ships, paintings, sculptures, and video games (i.e. Fortnight).
Typically, we don't put names of events, businesses, or career titles in quotes or italics, even if it’s a proper noun like Burning Man. As a writer, you can certainly decide to use italics for all titles, but be consistent. Nothing disturbs readers or publishers like a sprinkling of ten different formats throughout a written work.
Dialog or speeches. Here's where it gets messy. Some writers put dialog in quotes, italics, bold, or a giddy combination of any of those. If you want to look like a savvy writer, pick one, preferably double quotation marks alone—that's the popular convention. Go read a traditionally published novel, and you'll see. Inexperienced writers do this: Joe said, "I hate you." (bold, italics AND quotes)
That's overkill. Or, 'I hate you,' (single quote marks). Single quote marks are puzzling to most readers, even though they are stylish in some areas. Do you care about readers?
Back in the day, dialog could be found in italics; however, today, italics are most often used to identify internal thoughts, and that's what readers, editors, and publishers expect to encounter. Ex. I thought to myself, This just isn't fair! I said, "This just isn't fair."
The Chicago Manual forum says that nobody applies italics in speech anymore unless it's meant as 'air' italics to imply sarcasm. When writers do this, it often comes from having seen someone do it and liking the look. Not helpful to readers who aren't privy to those stylistic preferences.
Running quotations have interesting rules. In a passage containing multiple paragraphs of quoted material or dialog, how do you identify the whole speech? Simple. Don't close the double quotes at the end of the first paragraph, but open the second and all following paragraphs with double quotes. Keep doing that until the end of the last paragraph, where you'll close with one set of double quotes.
Punctuation when using quotation marks— Periods and commas nearly always go inside the closing quotation marks. ("I know nothing about grammar," she said.) It's trickier with em dash, colon and semi, question mark and exclamation point. If the punctuation is for the quoted material itself, put it inside. If it applies to the entire sentence or phrase, it goes outside.
Did the teacher say, "Homework is due tomorrow"?
I said, "Where are you going?" Do you understand the difference?
British English often doesn't follow these rules, but the world is changing, and so are writing conventions. Internet writing is a global entity, and fairly or unfairly, using British or other local conventions can stop readers in their tracks. We've become accustomed to merging patterns.
Single quotation marks are most often used to indicate a quote within a quote. Ex. "I told you John said 'meet me at the library.' I think he meant at 2 o'clock."
Singles can enclose an unfamiliar word or phrase, or one used in an unconventional sense. For example, 'Bloviation' is a really cool word. Or It's easy to complain about the 'decline' of English, but you are really just seeing living language changes.
An aside about indirect speech
There's a difference between an exact quote and indirect quotes or dialog. Indirect means you have rephrased something someone said and you're reporting the gist of their comment.
Indirect speech doesn't require quotes.
I'm careful about using indirect speech instead of a direct quote. If I want to condense a long bit from a news story about the election, for example, I might tell you that political website 538.com says the election didn't make voting better or worse, just different.
That avoids quoting and copying their 150-word paragraph that doesn't have much else to say.
However, if I want you to be inspired, I'd write, Shakespeare said, "Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” I would never presume to boil that down to Shakespeare saying that greatness isn't scary.
Writing is communication and should never be visually distracting. I see stories every day with dialog in double quotes, the next dialog in single, another in bold or italics or both, and yet another set as a block quote. By the time I see that third iteration, I have probably clicked away.
And don't even get me started on sprinkling emoji's, mini-glyphs, or hearts and stars all over your writing. Really, are we in middle school?
We all like being spontaneous, but if you study up a bit on conventional formatting and then remain consistent, you'll earn respect as a writer and probably see your audience grow. Publishers are more likely to believe you're experienced, and editors will be less crusty with you.
Very helpful — is there much difference in guidance on this subject between Chicago and AP manuals of style?
Need to make more use of italics. Otherwise, aside from a few errors due to doing most of my writing on my phone but my editing on a laptop (you'd be surprised where odd 's or .s crop up - or maybe not YOU but it often surprises ME), I seem to do the rest of it correctly. Mostly I used Strunk & White's Elements of Style and not the Chicago Manual