Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Single quotes certainly used to be used universally in British books, but I've noticed in recent years that more and more now use double quotes.
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How far back are you going, Harry? That 1943 Bulldog Drummond example was using double-quotes, and I have a 1927 Beau Geste that uses double-quotes. (The latter is technically an Australian edition, but I would have expected it to follow the UK source from which it was produced.) I haven't checked all my old hard-covers, but it seems to me that "universally" could be a bit strong.
I personally chose double quotes for dialogue because my own reading experience has been that single-quotes are occasionally confusing when possessive apostrophes are used within a sentence - especially in paragraphs where speech is interspersed with other narrative. (It can depend on the font and actual character used for apostrophes.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Having re-read my reference, I see that although it says a full stop can be used, in all the examples given a comma is used, even if the speech completes a sentence.
So I'm wrong in theory and practice on this point. Apologies.
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This was something I spent a lot of time on before publishing my first book (one of the many forms of procrastination I found
). Happily, I have a very diverse collection of books here. I'd read most of the books but I hadn't remembered how they used punctuation, I had to go through and check them. Most of the older ones are UK or Australian published, but I have enough American ones that I was able to test some of the unsubstantiated claims I'd read in Internet articles on these subjects. It seems that theory and practice can vary quite widely.