Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Yes. Absolutely years ago. Probably since printing had more than one font. It IS a silly idea. Periodically people revive it. It's very hard to read.
Well written dialogue can be followed with a minimum of speech tags and action tags/beats.
See "Witches Abroad."
Also the ‽ refuses to quite die too. The interrobang isn't needed either.
“Do you really understand what I mean?” exclaimed Jean.
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thank you for your for your frank and worldly wise response, much appreciated - Robin said laconically
One of the paradoxes (dreaded word fraught with logical argument) is as follows
Take your sentence above
Do you really understand what I mean
Imagine you take each word and separately put a vocal stress on it and observe how it alters the meaning of the sentence
Sometimes this can be trivially subtle and other times can completely alter the meaning of a plain spoken sentence - I hope this makes sense.
Question How to write this dramatic dialogue so the reader will understand
No doubt playwrights have solved this long ago - but that's way out of my bailiwick
Would this work
Do you really understand what I mean
Do
you really understand what I mean
Do you
really understand what I mean
Do you really
understand what I mean
Do you really understand
what I mean
Do you really understand what
I mean
Do you really understand what I
mean
I heard otherwise that the reason that legal english is so hard for the layman to understand is that no punctuation is used in their interminable sentences because it is deemed that a comma may alter meaning leading to courtroom battles. Victorian literature often featured this - rather pompous - style IMHO