“Was it an expensive sculpture that some kid dropped and he had to pay for it out of his own money or they didn’t let him graduate?” asks another. “Can anyone tell me what this is?” he asks. I tune out for a while and come back when he holds up a huge globe that is missing half of the Northern Hemisphere. What’s the problem?” (88–89)Įlsewhere in the same novel, Anderson occasionally changes style, running speeches by more than one speaker into the same paragraph: But we found an entire bag of beets in the collection closet. But (unlike playwrights) she places quotation marks around each speech. In her young adult novel Speak (New York: Square Fish, 1999), Laurie Halse Anderson writes speaker names followed by a colon, as in a script for a stage play, and starts a new paragraph for each speaker. There are other practices and combinations of techniques that creative writers shouldn’t hesitate to embrace and their editors shouldn’t hesitate to support. (6)Ĭhapter 13 in The Chicago Manual of Style covers the traditional options for quoted dialogue and offers guidelines related to punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing, but CMOS by no means exhausts the possibilities for creative writers. The boy said: You never been at a revival?Įasy as pie. “Shi-yi . . . ?” My dream! In spite of everything it was coming true!Īnother common style dispenses with quotation marks, as Linda Spalding does in her novel A Reckoning (New York: Anchor Books, 2017): “Ji-li, all the sixth-grade teachers agreed to assign you to Shi-yi Junior High.” “Instead of an entrance exam, teachers are assigning students to their schools.” She paused. “You know the junior high school admissions policy has changed,” Teacher Gu said. Here’s an example from Ji-li Jiang’s memoir, Red Scarf Girl (New York: Harper Trophy, 1997): To help readers keep track of who’s speaking without the constant repetition of tags, it’s also traditional to start a new paragraph when the speaker changes. In novels and stories and other creative works, words spoken by a character are normally set off from the narrative with quotation marks, and the speaker is identified in the run of text by tags like “she said.” This is not only Chicago style-it’s an old convention that continues to dominate literature today.
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