Hi all

What is the correct punctuation to be used when a character speaking is interrupted?

For a very rough example:

Speaker 1: 'Kathy, come inside or you'll catch your...'
Speaker 2: 'Death? Ali, it's ok you know, you can say it.'

Speaker 1: 'Kathy, come inside or you'll catch your-'
Speaker 2: 'Death? Ali, it's ok you know, you can say it.'

Thanks in advance

Katie x

... is for if the speaker trails off into silence.

- is for if she breaks off because she's interrupted by someone or something.

(space before as well as after the - , btw, and you should spell it okay...)

Emma

Thanks for the quick response Emma - much appreciated.

And thanks for pointing out the spelling error. Can't believe I did that!

Katie x

Just for my own enlightenment and not for an argument, could you tell me why ok, O.K. OK etc should be spelled okay, please?

I think it's a matter of house style, isn't it? And it's usually either 'OK' (the way my copy editors have always rendered it) or 'okay'.

(But having said that it's house style, that makes no sense if you use 'okay', Emma - since we're with the same 'house'!)

??

Rosy


<Added>

And, weirdly, I have always had the dash for an interrupted speech rendered with NO space before it, again contrary to what you say, Emma.

<Added>

And no space after it, either. Unlike dashes used in the middles of sentences, which do have a space before and after.

I had this argument with my supervisor on the MPhil and was persuaded over to his point of view. As in:

ok isn't okay, as it's an abbreviation. O.K. in caps is okay. Or OK, since it's almost a word of itself, like Mr and Mrs: that'll very much be a matter of house style. But the thing about 'okay' is that it reads like a word: it's pronounceable, as it were, and it doesn't stick out in the flow of the sentence.

Maybe it's relevant that my supervisor is a poet as well as a novelist, and much more alert to the interaction of sound, word and sight than prose writers usually are.

Rosy, I dunno how many okays there are in my work - they didn't say it a lot in 1819, nor yet in 1471... Though there must be one or two in the modern strands...

Emma

<Added>

The dash for interrupted speech is tricky, because we're so limited here. In print,

'I don't know how you-'

should be an m-rule, with, yes, no space between the letter and it. I think I'm right in saying that in the old typewriter days you showed an m-rule with two hyphens: 'I don't know how you--' and you'll still find -- converting to a m-rule in the auto-correct bit of many wp programs.

The reason I'd say have a space before the - is that it distinguishes it from a hypen

'Are you pro- or anti-capitalist?'

'Are you pro - '
'No, I'm anti-capitalist?

When it comes to:

'I don't know - no, I don't know - how you can do it.'

are n-rules, spaces all round.

But, actually, it's all really the copy-editor's job to mark up these things.

My head hurts now. So, yes - thank heaven for copy editors!

R x

Two hyphens = en-rule in this editorial dept. But then we're non-fiction.