Fred Soper asks about...

Interior Monologue

I was reading an article by David Harrington [on punctuation and grammar]. He said, “Character thoughts should not be in quotation marks, they should be italics.” I have never heard of this before, what are your thoughts on this as a Magazine editor?

That’s an excellent question. The short answer is: Harrington’s advice is good up to a point, but it can’t be made a rule. There is no standard typography for interior monologue. There are a few options, but none is completely satisfactory. Our contributors are all over the place:

Some treat interior monologue as standard dialogue and put it in full quotes. That option may work, but it can’t be recommended, because it may give an initial impression that the words are spoken aloud.
Some use italics. That’s okay as long as the interior monologue is very short. Bob Blevins’ “The Inn Between,” in this issue, has a lot of interior monologue in italics, and the style seems very effective.

However, the use of italics may cause two problems:
1. More than one line of italics becomes hard to read. If a longer section of text absolutely has to be distinguished from the rest, it’s better indented as a block quote in plain text or set off by a border.
2. Italics are used so often that they may cause ambiguity: they’re also used for emphasis as well as the titles of various things such as books and films.
A side note: We use boldface only in page titles, list items, and — rarely — in suhbheadings such as the initial chapter titles in Jeff Brown’s “The Diner and That Same Old Feeling Again.” We never use the “strong” tag (boldface) for emphasis.
Some put the characters’ thoughts in single quotes and spoken dialogue in the usual double quotes. That may be distinctive enough, but it’s a close call. Tala Bar uses that style frequently in Gaia. However, that option is not available in British punctuation, where single and double quotes are the exact reverse of North American style (cf. Michael E. Lloyd’s Observation One).

I know you’re busy, and I appreciate your quick response and all the info. But I have one last question, How do you prefer it to come to you. You read all day so I would like to make it as easy as possible on you and your eyes.

Thank you, Fred, that’s very considerate. The best thing to do is follow the “recipe” in the Style Manual.

Fonts and sizes don’t matter. I save everything in an 18-point serif font for easy reading.

Three things I regularly wish for:

RTF files sent as attachments rather than copy-pasted into an e-mail message. We’ve had good luck with them so far, but one typo in the process and blooie, I have to ask for a resend. I’d think that attachments would be easier for the senders as well as for me.
Paragraphing the way the Style Manual recommends. I wish I had a nickel for all the typewriter-style tabs and weird spacings I’ve had to delete.
No hard spaces or soft returns (line feeds) in Word documents. They’re not very common, but I routinely do a find-replace pass to remove them. I don’t know what they’re used for; maybe to justify text in the original for some reason, but I’d think that would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Thanks for asking!

Don