Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
I've found both what I think of as "soft" scene breaks (extra blank space) and "hard" scene breaks (extra space with an ornament, three asterisks, or horizontal rule) in books. Usually a book uses one style or the other, but I've seen the occasional book, both printed and ebook, that use both, one indicating a small jump and the other a larger one.
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With print books at least, it has been my experience that there is rarely any difference between what you're calling a soft break and a hard break other than where they happen to fall on a page. Where a break would fall somewhere within a page, these breaks typically just have a larger space, though some books couple this with no indentation on the first new paragraph following the break. The breaks with the asterisks or some other symbol are almost always used only where the break falls at the very top or bottom of a page. Other than that, there's typically not really any difference in the severity or importance of the break. Far more often than not, it's just a positional/typesetting thing and most books that I read use both.
Now, that's not to say some certain book or publisher may not use this differently and I'm certain I've read the occasional book that does, but I think these are in the minority.
- Byron