Another little dialogue query occurred to me this weekend. If a character starts to speak and has to brake off suddenly like this:-

‘I should think-‘ The telephone rang and he stared at it etc.

Now I put a dash at the end without a space and followed by a closed quotation mark, again without a space. But I’ve noticed that the end quotation mark faces the other way, as if it doesn’t recognise the dash. In fact it doesn’t look right to me. Then I thought, what about the famous three dots. . . but that doesn’t look right either.

I can usually solve this sort of problem by looking through some novels to see how other writers handle it but I’ve been looking all weekend and of course I couldn’t find any examples.

I wondered what others use - and what is correct?

Michael

My copy editor does exactly what you do, i.e. a dash and a close quotation marks, no spaces. This is for an interruption or sudden breaking off, as opposed to the ellipsis thingy (...) when the person tails of slowly...

Rosy

Rosy's right, but technically it shouldn't be a dash, but an m-rule, which is twice as long. You can get one in Word by pressing alt+ the minus on the keypad, or alt + 0151, but I'm sure there are other ways. As you say, if you don't leave a space the intelligent quotes should then recognise it and turn themselves the right way round. If not, you can get a right-way-round one with ctrl + apostrophe + apostrophe. Some wordprocessors auto-correct two dashes into one m-rule, I think, just as they auto-correct a dash into an n-rule if you have a space after it.

But actually, it really doesn't matter. Wrong-way-round quotation marks do look as if you haven't bothered or don't know the difference, but only copy-editors and typesetters need to get down and dirty with the length of dashes.

Emma

Thanks Emma. Very useful. Didn't know this. But on my version of Word Alt does nothing but Ctrl+Num- appears to do the trick - it gives a slightly thiner and longer line.

Michael

I suspect there are all sorts of different shortcuts. You can always do 'insert' 'symbol' and take it from there, but it means lots of mousing instead of nice quick keystrokes.

But, as I said, fundamentally it really doesn't matter very much, as long as you're consistent. It won't get you rejected, and it's a copy-editor's job to mark up the script!

Emma