Interrupting dialogue
Sep. 29th, 2010 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarken posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
grammaticalThis one's been bugging me for a while, but I kept hoping I'd come up with a less godawful sentence with the same problem. However, such is not the case, so here I go.
I want my character's action to interrupt her speech. I think the thing to do is use em dashes, but I have no idea where to put them. So, for now, you get commas and a plea for help.
I want my character's action to interrupt her speech. I think the thing to do is use em dashes, but I have no idea where to put them. So, for now, you get commas and a plea for help.
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides," Rachel looks at the way her breasts bob in the water, "I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 06:26 am (UTC)I don't know if this is an Official Correct way of doing things but it seems logical to me: the first em-dash interrupts her speech so it's right next to "besides" without any spacing, but the second em-dash comes after the aside is completed so has spacing either side.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 06:36 am (UTC)I kept trying to Google this, but either there's no official way to do it or there's another way of describing it, since I kept coming up with how to have one character interrupt another, and that was in no way what I wanted.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 07:46 am (UTC)If I was using dashes, I would probably go with:
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--" Rachel looks at the way her breasts bob in the water. "--I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
Or, if that still looks too weird (and it kinda does, yes) I would make the action into a dialogue tag:
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--" Rachel says, looking at the way her breasts bob in the water, "--I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
I *think* the reason this consistently looks off is that you aren't really supposed to use two em-dashes to set off a 'parenthetical' (People do it all the time -- I abuse dashes as a hobby -- but if you're going for a grammatically correct voice, they aren't meant to be paired.)
So what you've got here is either one dash dividing up Rachel's line, which just happens to have a dialogue tag in the middle of it:
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
Or two separate fragments of dialogue, one of which ends with a dash and one of which begins with a dash, which have another independent sentence between them:
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--"
"--I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
(I suspect the most stickly grammatically correct option is:
"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--" Rachel looks at the way her breasts bob in the water, "I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
Your sentence is "Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides--I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl." ; the dialogue tag is inserted after the dash, with your normal post-tag comma after it. But that way looks funny too.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 07:56 am (UTC)"Only if a crab with a Jamaican accent starts singing. Besides" --Rachel looks at the way her breasts bob in the water-- "I'm pretty sure I'm already a real girl."
But that one looks even more wrong to me. <_<
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 09:48 am (UTC)I agree that it looks wrong like that. Not quite as wrong as the commas, which make my brain start screaming about dialogue tags and comma splices, but it's still pretty bad. Kind of naked and unbalanced. I can see the logic of putting the dash outside the quotation marks (it keeps the punctuation attached to the right part of the sentence), but that doesn't make it look any less awkward.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 07:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 09:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-30 04:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-29 03:58 pm (UTC)And you used — instead of --! ♥ ♥ ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-30 04:16 am (UTC)*grins* I have to admit that using the proper — was aided by that being a cut and paste into the blockquote. (Although I like to think that in this context I would have done it properly, whereas in Word documents both the en and the em get subsumed into the double hyphen autoformatting.)