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Originally Posted by Katsunami
You may be right, but I don't understand. What is the reason for omitting the closing quotation mark?
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I don't remember if this is something I learned or something I assumed, but I always understood the reason for this was to signal that it wasn't a new speaker.
If the paragraph ended with a quotation mark, and the very next paragraph began with one, I took that as a visual clue that it was someone else speaking. If not, same speaker.
Oh - and my opinion on no quotation marks at all? Fuggetaboutit. I wouldn't bother to read it.
I read authors now who may have the characters thinking to themselves in the middle of a conversation. They often set those off now by italicizing the thoughts and putting quotation marks around the spoken words. How confusing would that be without any visual cues?? This occurs to me now because I've been noticing it today in the audiobook I'm listening to.
For example, maybe some jerk that a woman otherwise has to be polite to (maybe a boss or friend of a friend) asks her out for a date. You'll seem something like:
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"Hey, baby, wouldn't you like to come and see my etchings tonight?"
Not if my life depended on it. "Oh, I'm sorry, but I've got book club."
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The character in the audiobook I'm listening to now has a sarcastic streak a mile wide, but she's in a political situation where she has to behave herself, at least outwardly. So there are lots of mental asides like this, and it's not always obvious from the reading that she didn't actually say something smart-ass like that out loud, other than you know she shouldn't.
(And even more off topic, she's currently in a situation where a being who maintains safe passage in a sort of magical way-station can hear everyone's thoughts, so he keeps responding to her mental asides and getting her in trouble with the stiff-necked lords she's travelling with
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EDITED TO ADD: Oops, sorry DiapDealer. We were pretty much typing at the same time!
