How annoying is the lack of quotation marks to you?

[MeSue]

I started and bailed on Plainsong by Kent Haruf partly due to the lack of quotation marks. If it had grabbed me in other ways, I might have continued, but the book just felt dreary and depressing, so I quit. Shortly before that, I had read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, which I loved. It had a mute character and no quotation marks were used when the dialog was in sign language. It was jarring at first, but I got used to it because I was enjoying the story so much. However, I still would have preferred some kind of dialog indicator for the signing. Those are the only two books I have encountered recently where quotation marks were deliberately omitted.

[Geralt]

I hate much more the use of quotation marks, where they shouldn't be. Some writers are so trigger happy when it comes to them.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

As particular as I am about having punctuation (and spelling) correct, I actually prefer it if publishers would leave books alone as originally written either in the UK or US and not do a different book. I can adapt to the UK's punctuation and spelling, that doesn't bother me at all, I realize it will be different and I actually enjoy knowing the differences.

But what I find even more annoying is when they also insist on giving the book a different title between the US and UK, so you think there's 2 books by a favorite author you waste time hunting down, only to find out they're one and the same. That just drives me nuts :P. The differences aren't that great that we won't understand the books from the other side of the pond or even choose not to buy them because they aren't published for US or UK.

I think one way to deal with the issue is to include a short explanation of the use punctuation at the beginning of the book. That way, the reader will have an indication of what the author intended and it can also avoid confusion when using non-standard punctuation.

As an example, in stories I've written I've used [ and ] to surround text that indicates a character's thoughts, using them just like quote marks for text spoken by a character. At the beginning of the story I included a short statement indicating what [ and ] means, and also what other formatting/punctuation choices mean (such as Courier New for text that appears on a screen within the story).

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by MeSue

Shortly before that, I had read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, which I loved. It had a mute character and no quotation marks were used when the dialog was in sign language. It was jarring at first, but I got used to it because I was enjoying the story so much. However, I still would have preferred some kind of dialog indicator for the signing. Those are the only two books I have encountered recently where quotation marks were deliberately omitted.

I've seen something like this--the character's signing was rendered without quotation marks, spoken language did have quotation marks. It was understandable and there was certainly a legitimate reason for the omission. I can't remember the book, but the character was deaf and sometimes signed and sometimes spoke.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I think one way to deal with the issue is to include a short explanation of the use punctuation at the beginning of the book. That way, the reader will have an indication of what the author intended and it can also avoid confusion when using non-standard punctuation.

As an example, in stories I've written I've used [ and ] to surround text that indicates a character's thoughts, using them just like quote marks for text spoken by a character. At the beginning of the story I included a short statement indicating what [ and ] means, and also what other formatting/punctuation choices mean (such as Courier New for text that appears on a screen within the story).

If I saw an explanation of punctuation or fonts at the beginning of a book, my first impulse would be to close that book and go on to something else.

I am curious why you use square brackets when the conventional way to indicate direct thoughts is italics.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I like understanding who's saying what, and when...I've read dialogue that was immaculately quoted and punctuated that I still couldn't make heads or tails out of, no matter how many times I re-read it. Conversely, I've found myself happily reading along for quite some time before I even noticed that there wasn't much in the way of punctuation to denote dialogue.

So I guess the bottom line is: if I don't notice they're not there and the dialogue feels natural and is easy to follow ... I suppose I don't really give a damn if they're there or not. *shrugs*

Overall I agree with you. The area I disagree is the lack of dialog indicators-although the indicators don't always make the dialog easy to follow it seems to me that the lack of indicators always makes it hard-at least when there's more than just a very small amount at a time.

The problem I've found is the lack of attention somebody pays to standards. For instance, when the speaker changes it's supposed to start a new paragraph:
"I said this."
"No, you said that."

That appears to limit each speaker to a single paragraph so there's another standard (I think-haven't written professionally for years now and when I did it was technical so very little dialog) that the closing quote is omitted when the speaker continues in a new paragraph. That seems to cause most of the problems-the punctuation makes it seem that the speaker has changed but the content eventually says otherwise.

"I said this.
"And another thing, I said that."
"No, you didn't say that."
"But I did say this."
Above makes it clear speaker 1 is claiming to say both this & that, speaker 2 is contradicting speaker 1 and then speaker 1 is correcting (him)self.

"I said this."
"And another thing, I said that."
"No, you didn't say that."
"But I did say this."
Above looks as if speaker 1 is claiming to say this, speaker 2 is claiming to say that, speaker 1 is contradicting speaker 2 & speaker 2 is then contradicting (him)self.

Omitting dialog indicators is at least as confusing as using them improperly, IMO.

Better yet (IMO) would be if authors explicitly state who's saying what.
"I said this.
"And another thing, I said that," said speaker 1.
"No, you didn't say that," said speaker 2.
"But I did say this," said speaker 1.

Sometimes cumbersome but very, very clear who says what.

[Julius Caesar]

Without quotation marks, I would find it confusing if a book is written as a narration from a third party observer. Sherlock Holmes books for example are narrated by Watson. If there are no quotation marks, I could get confused if the person talking is another person or Watson.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Catlady

If I saw an explanation of punctuation or fonts at the beginning of a book, my first impulse would be to close that book and go on to something else.

I am curious why you use square brackets when the conventional way to indicate direct thoughts is italics.

It comes from my early days of ebook formatting. Some of the displays I used, such as on some PDAs, couldn't display italics so I used square brackets.

[4691mls]

Better yet (IMO) would be if authors explicitly state who's saying what.
"I said this.
"And another thing, I said that," said speaker 1.
"No, you didn't say that," said speaker 2.
"But I did say this," said speaker 1.

Sometimes cumbersome but very, very clear who says what.[/QUOTE]

I don't mind not having the names if it's only a few sentences of dialogue, but if the conversation goes on for a whole page, eventually I lose track of who's saying what.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

It comes from my early days of ebook formatting. Some of the displays I used, such as on some PDAs, couldn't display italics so I used square brackets.

Oh, OK. I still wouldn't explain it, though, as it shouldn't take long for a reader to get the gist of what you're doing.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I think one way to deal with the issue is to include a short explanation of the use punctuation at the beginning of the book. That way, the reader will have an indication of what the author intended and it can also avoid confusion when using non-standard punctuation.

As an example, in stories I've written I've used [ and ] to surround text that indicates a character's thoughts, using them just like quote marks for text spoken by a character. At the beginning of the story I included a short statement indicating what [ and ] means, and also what other formatting/punctuation choices mean (such as Courier New for text that appears on a screen within the story).

I tend to dislike books that have to be explained at the front of the book. If I see a lengthy list of characters, a long read this first before you begin or a 'special' language dictionary right at the front of the book then I think argghhh not this again.

In paper books I could easily skip by it. Not that hard in ebooks but it annoys me.

An appendix is fine with me, but I resent an author trying to make me learn who is what before I actually care, or telling me why they write a certain way and why it is better before I actually know if I like their writing. If I like the writing style, I probably don't care why, and if I dislike it is akin to someone telling me to eat something I dislike because they think it is good for me.

Helen

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

This is a jekyl and hyde post. The second half is a legitimate and pertinent critique of the effect of ommitting quotation marks in experimental fiction. The first half is a trite harangue that completely misses the point of the poster it was addressed to.

<snip because it's being repeated later>

To paraphrase, you shouldn't judge a work if you falsely expect something to be what it is not.

I disagree--that's not what I inferred from the original post, nor the follow-up to the discussion. There's a marked difference between someone picking up, say, "The Road" and trashing it because for some reason, they thought it was going to be a buddy-travel adventure, and a reader "not getting it," which was the language of the original post.

If you pick up a romance novel expecting it to be a thriller, the work doesn't warrant your judgement based on your faulty expectations.

Just as i wouldn't call a physics dissertation a bad work because it doesn't tell a rip-roaring story.

Again, you seem to have inferred something entirely different from the original series of posts than did I. Catlady's original post said:

The problem is that any use of a nonstandard style calls attention to itself, which distracts the reader from the substance--so an author should have a darn good reason to abandon conventional practices of punctuation.

Catlady said nothing more than that which had already been said; when an author endeavors to use either a device or artifice which distracts from the substance, he risks detracting from the work, or taking the reader out of the work; to which the reply about readers "not getting it" was posted. There's nothing in either post which discusses a reader's expectations being somehow askew, or the reader misunderstanding the genre; the reply is clearly stating that the reader simply doesn't understand what the author is attempting to do in literary fiction. This line:

There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story.

is obviously not about someone picking up a romance novel thinking it's a thriller, or vice-versa. The very term "literary fiction" takes this out of the simplistic realm of genre confusion. The sentence pretty clearly states that the reader is simply too stupid to "get" what the author was doing in our hypothetical piece of literary fiction. And if that wasn't clear in that post, the succeeding two posts between the participants crystallize it.

A thing should be judged on the basis of what it is. Many people pick up literary fiction expecting a conventional story with conventional language and grammar. Then they rubbish the work based on those expectations and criteria. There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story.

To repeat TGS's points, literary fiction often experiments with form to see what effect that has on meaning and experience. As we see on this thread, to many posters think a work is ipso facto "pretentious" if it doesn't focus exclusively on the story, as if conventional format was handed down by god as the perfect means of expression for all meaning and experience.

To add a point of my own, literary fiction also tries to get us to think about how and why we use language and grammar. The fact that we are here discussing the effects of ommitting quotation marks means that those works have succeeded, even if you don't like them. In other words, literary fiction doesn't have to likeable to be effective. Indeed, it is often most effective when it is not likeable. The market-place standard is not the only legitimate standard.

If you don't like literary fiction that's fine. But there is a difference between saying something like "i don't like horses" and saying "that is a defective horse because it doesn't do algebra." The former is a personal preference, which are always valid, although not always legal or moral. The latter is a silly, incongruous judgement, which is what many do with literary fiction.

And I repeat: authors are free to experiment with whatever form they wish, to achieve any effect that they wish. However, there's also a cognitive-dissonance, faux-distinction between "art" and "commerce" that is all-too-frequently blurred in the writing (and painting, sculpting, etc.) world. (Personally, I blame this on the Church, dating from medieval times, but that's another discussion altogether). Your position seems to be that even if the reader plunks down their hard-earned, if they got something that they didn't expect--and didn't like it--they don't have the right to say so. Why don't they?

This line of arguments puts the burden on the reader, not the author; if the reader's not "up to snuff," well, then s/he should keep her mouth shut. If a piece of experimental literary fiction is incomprehensible to the reader, and she hates it, well--she's just not smart enough to understand it. In plain English, isn't that what's being said? And, as she's too stupid to understand it, she's not entitled to "rubbish it," even though she bought the product. If a work is commercially unsuccessful, and gets trashed by the readers, they weren't entitled to comment on it in the first place. Isn't that the distilled version? One may discount any criticism that "doesn't get" the device deployed by the author--if the critic didn't like it, they didn't get it, and thus, the critique may be devalued, branded as illegitimate, and utterly ignored.

Your example of horses and algebraic horses is not, I fear, truly representative of the issue. If a consumer buys a movie-theater ticket, to see a dramatic, literary movie she has heard about, and instead, is treated to a 90 minute stage-play of mimes in facemasks acting out the parts--no matter how cleverly--she's entitled to say that she thought it was pretentious and silly and worse, boring. It doesn't matter if it's the same drama for which she purchased a ticket, simply told in a different form. That's no different than any author trying a convention outside the norm. The artistic (and commercial) risk is the artistic (and commercial) risk--and like any venture, the audience is still entitled to say what they think. Why is that "silly and incongruous?" You don't think that idea is the height of condescension?

The "Jekyll and Hyde" part of this discussion isn't mine--it's that of our hypothetical author. If a writer wants to experiment with form, to see how it affects substance, certainly, that's his prerogative; but that doesn't mean that those who read it don't have the right to dislike it; to think otherwise truly would be pretentious rubbish. You can say that "the market-place isn't the only legitimate standard," and you'd be right; but the reality is, it's readers who put down their own money, to buy an author's efforts. If they don't like it, the writer can console himself with the idea that the hoi polloi simply don't have the education to understand what s/he was trying to do.

You are viewing various aspects of literary fiction as "art," but publishing is a business. Any author who sells his work, either to a publishing house or as an Indy, is operating a business. And like any business, his products are open to criticism, from whoever buys them, for whatever reason. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And if you disagree, ask every author you know whether they'd rather sell one copy of their novel, and win a Pulitzer, or a million copies of their novel, but not. (I know what the 2,000+ authors who've passed through our doors would say, pretty much down to a wo/man--even the poets.)

The Jekyll and Hyde part of this is the disconnect between how an author views their "art," coupled to the capitalistic cart that puts the book on SALE to a buying public.

Back OT: literary devices can be deployed as the writer sees fit; but I've seen a ton of books on Amazon, patently self-published (you can tell by the egregiously bad formatting even before you get to the body) in which dialogue is indistinguishable from narrative. I've seen novels with stage-directions in them, between narrative paragraphs. I've seen books mixing past/present tense, (in the same sentence--not flashbacks) and the like. I saw one that was purportedly a novel, but had each speaker identified like a screenplay, with the character's name followed by a colon, even though the narrative was written in the normal way. (The author told me that he couldn't be bothered to write all those dialogue tags, and that it was "too much work.") That's not "experimental fiction," it's just BAD fiction, written by people who've never even taken a high-school writing class. I think nowadays we readers are increasingly burdened by bad books, and it indubitably must weary us all, so that we are suspicious of even a solid talent's work, when it departs from the norm.

I can say without batting an eyelash that my view of authoring, publishing, etc., has changed dramatically over the past five years, and I think that anyone heavily involved in the Indy publishing industry has to be equally affected. I realize that my perspective of "books as products" will be unwelcome to many who write. {shrug}. I suspect, however, that it's a view that's more widely shared by readers than many authors would like to think. I'm not interested in a fight about it; you can tell yourself that I'm a Philistine and just blow it off. ;-)

Hitch

[speakingtohe]

@Hitch
Not disputing your arguments but having a hard time getting a handle on them.

Speaking for myself, I am pretty tolerant of stylistic formatting if I like the book, and can't see why I would care if I don't like it. It is like reading Shakespeare in old English. Once upon a time I did it and actually thought it was swell, but I doubt I would do it now by choice.

Still I don't want to be told I am an idiot because I don't understand or agree with what the author has to say or with their methods of expression. I actually have no compulsion to criticise a book. If I don't like it I stop reading, literary or not. Can't constructively criticise it without reading the whole book, and my martyr impulses do not go in that direction. I could understand it in non-fiction but reading an entire fiction book I am not enjoying seems pretty pointless.

And while I wouldn't buy a horse who could do algebra it might be fun to read a book about one. Shows to what a low level my literary standards have sunken to

Helen

[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by frahse

Each person is entitled to their own likes and dislikes but I prefer to save my heavy criticism for the writing itself, rather than any superficial artifice that might be used.

But without any indicator of dialog - quotation marks, dashes, whatever - I have to waste my time deciphering whether or not what I'm reading is being spoken or just thought by the character. That in turn detracts from the writing because the author himself/herself is causing me to lose focus on the actual storyline.

Add to that the difficulties in formatting that often occur when books are converted into ebooks - lack of scene ending hints, loss of italics, for example - and it creates even more problems.

[Pulpmeister]

While I can understand (to a degree) a writer using a cultural tradition in this matter, such as dashes for dialogue, which seems to be the norm in some cultures, I can't see the value in using unconventional or nonexistent quotes unless it enhances the work, rather than detracts from it.

The convention in English literature is the single or double inverted commas, and there would have to be some very sound reasons to depart from this standard, which is a proven aid to intelligibility.

The problem with the dash to introduce speech is that it doesn't have a "close quote" indicator, and this is what makes reading it difficult. In the Flann O'Brien novel I cited which uses dashes, there are numerous paragraphs which start with the dash, indicating speech, and then well into the paragraph comes another dash, indicating speech again, by someone else. Somewhere in the middle of the paragraph the first speaker gave way to the narrator, and then a second speaker began. But it's very hard to tell where. And this is the reason why unconventional speech indicators impede understanding. I am quite sure that every writer (save a few eccentrics like James Joyce) really do want their reader to understand what's going on.

If you are writing in English today, your readership, whoever they might be, expect conventional speech indicators. You abandon them at your peril. I am quite sure that a writer of today doing otherwise is being pretentious or being lazy. I say lazy, because a quick flick with a finger at the dash key is easier than shift/flick for the inverted comma key--twice.