Quoting Writing Treated As Dialogue

[CMBright]

Non-human character who is unable to use human speech is using writing as dialogue. Instinct is saying to put it in quotes and indicate wrote instead of said in dialogue tags.

“Go,” 287 wrote to Person.
“Stay while sick. Go when you are healthy.”
“Listen, please,” Hanako wrote.

And I just realized the doctor's name looks why too much like person instead of Scandinavian Per's son patronomic. That'll need to change.

 

[Brigid Barry]

I would agree on the quotes because it's intended as speech and this will be a lot smoother for the reader. Just mho!

 

[SWest]

Yeah, that totally works.

You might want to consider if they are using punctuation rules...people don't always go that way when writing notes. But you will get more emotional content into facial expression, gestures, pen pressure, etc..

*****
forex:

"Listen - please," Hanoko wrote, underlining please.

 

[CMBright]

Thanks. I know direct thoughts tend to be italics. I know how to quote a paragraph of writing in a research paper. But a line of intended as dialoge that is written instead of spoken? I didn't know if there was a more or less standard way of handling that.

I do like the idea of noting ways the writing is being handled. I already have quick drawings for missing words. 287 has/is learning from a young child about to enter 1st grade. Mature for her age, but still with a limited vocabulary.

I'll have to think if the doc is using standard punctuation, I suspect the girl's parents would not. The girl's teacher would use proper grammer, since she would be teaching 287 as much as Hanako.

 

[ChaseJxyz]

Are both parties writing, or only one?

What I would do (but, keep in mind, I am insane) is have the spoken words "in regular quotation marks" and the written stuff <<in the angled bracket quotation marks>> which I don't have easy access to because I'm on my work computer and I don't have gaming keys I have them mapped to (and also they keyboard doesn't have a numpad so I can't alt code them lol).

I wrote a story once where one character was speaking and the other was using a sign language, so I used both. But there was also a few times the speaker would sign things, too, so I wanted to quickly/visually indicate "okay she's signing this now instead of saying it."

 

[anaemic_mind]

I have a character in my WIP who writes & types some of their dialogue as she can't talk at various points. I've flip-flopped between different approaches through every draft and I think I posted here about it at some point. Lately, I'm erring on the side of treating it like ordinary dialogue with just wrote/scribbled/typed depending on how she's 'speaking'. Most of the time she's the only one writing though, so it flows a bit better as a conversation that way. But it looks odd with or without proper punctuation so not sure it's going to stick.

 

[Maryn]

I've seen something very like what Chase describes, and it might be better than replacing said-words with wrote-words. This was a newspaper columnist who wrote what his dog was saying, using the degree symbol in place of quotation marks.

"Hey, boy, you hungry?"
°°You took long enough.°°
"Uh-oh, we're low on the one you like. This one's good, too."
°°I'll be urinating on the carpet later.°°

The reader never lost track of who was "speaking," but it did lend a sort of light-hearted flavor to it that may not be appropriate for what you're writing.

Another approach could be a font change for the written part, something sans serif and tech-looking.

"Hey, boy, you hungry?"
You took long enough.
"Uh-oh, we're low on the one you like. This one's good, too."
I'll be urinating on the carpet later.

Again, it makes it clear who is communicating and that it's not normal speech. And it does allow you to not have a dialogue tag in every single line the non-human says.

Other considerations are the immediacy of written dialogue--does it appear on a screen or printed out at the speed of speech, or does the human have to wait? Is there a way the non-human can emphasize words, and does the entity understand that concept and recognize it when heard? Does the communication skill of the child teaching the non-human result in comprehensible content? All kinds of niggling details to determine.

Maryn, who'd have to nail a lot of stuff down before attempting this

 

[CMBright]

Thank you, all.

I, personally, think <<text >> looks better than °°text °°.

Mentally and physically, 287 is a full adult. She isn't human and doesn't quite think like a human. She learns increadibly fast for reasons. She does have her own language, part audible, part visual, think the neanderthals in Clan of the Cave Bear.

287 does hear human voices, but most of it is the same babble we would hear when we watch a foreign film. If one had never seen a film before, one might intuit that the sounds had a pattern and meaning, but not what the meaning was or necessarily where one word ends and another begins.

Hanako is linguistically advanced for her age. She is saying the words as she writes them and draws a picture next to the word when they are learning together. Concrete words like tree or house are more easily communicated in this format than more abstract words. Words tend to be written in a logical order, even if the formal grammar is sometimes ignored.

In the above, 287 wants to leave, but is missing a few words in her demand of "Go". The doc is deliberately simplifying his wording in the exchange. Hanako is used to a spoken language where words are commonly omitted if it is clear from the context of the conversation. This is reflected in her writing.

I would expect 287 to emphasize words by either tapping, leaving ink dots next to or around the words or by underlining. I had not thought about the difference between speaking a word and writing a word. It is hand written, not typed. I do know 287 would use doodle level drawings to fill in missing words she has not learned yet.

I am working on filling in all those niggling little details, but I keep finding ones I didn't expect. Like using writing instead of speaking as a form of dialogue, and if there is a proper grammatical convention I'm unaware of or if I'm winging it. The fact that it takes slightly longer to write a word instead of speak a word didn't occur to me. I have been thinking about the complexity of conveying abstract concepts like verbs to someone without a shared language. The pair does tend to bond quite a bit over the lunch boxes Hanako's mom packs for her.

Taking lots of notes as I work through the thread. Thanks again.

 

[Brightdreamer]

I, personally, think <<text >> looks better than °°text °°.

Just a note that, if you display your story online (not in a PDF-type or e-book format), there's a chance a browser will try to interpret anything between << and >> as HTML tags, which will really mess up your story because it'll hide the dialog between them...

This is something that happened back in the day when Animorphs fanfic writers would write Andalite thought-speech as presented in the books, which used << and >> instead of quote marks... some you had to open the HTML view and pick the dialog out of the page code.

Yes, I read some Animorphs fanfic back in the day...

Anyway, something to keep in mind depending on your end goal for the story. I don't believe this is a problem if it's in an actual e-book type document, but you might come up with another way to designate non-spoken "dialog".

 

[ChaseJxyz]

Just a note that, if you display your story online (not in a PDF-type or e-book format), there's a chance a browser will try to interpret anything between << and >> as HTML tags, which will really mess up your story because it'll hide the dialog between them...

Don't worry I am home now and can post the actual things.

«Hell yeah just look at THIS»

Alt + 174 and Alt + 175

 

[CWNitz]

That said, if you do want to use brackets in a browser-rendering environment, you can do it like this:

&lt;&lt;Your dialogue between brackets&gt;&gt;

Also, the sources of ebooks are HTML as well, so you also want to double check your brackets with an ebook viewer if you use them (Amazon has a free Kindle previewer if you need it).

 

[JohnLine]

It might be too subtle, but I use double quotes for words spoken aloud and single quotes for everything else:

"What time is the party?" he asked her.

'8:15,' she texted back on her phone.