How to punctuate this...

[Nick B]

How do you punctuate/write a broken up radio transmission?

For instance if the sentence is hard to hear, broken due to interference. As an example, on a battlefield and something is making communications very hard and broken up. Do you use elipses, dashes? Something else entirely? Strange sound effects such as cominc book kkrrtzzzts, or Brrkksttszzzz's? I want partial messages in the dialogue so characters can almost understand what is being said but can't be sure.

In a couple of sections we have serious action sequences when communications fail like this and speech is only partially clear. It's been bothering me for ages and I can't find any examples in any books I have.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I don't think there's a standard way to do this. Personally, I would NOT use the sound effects.

Maybe I would do something like this:

Mayday . . . breaking up . . . fifteen . . .

I choose the italics to set it off from being ordinary dialogue, and use an ellipsis to indicate that something is missing. A dash, to me, would more indicate a pause rather than an omission.

 

[Ursa major]

I've come to use em-dashes to indicate where someone's speech has been interrupted. Usually this happens when someone else butts in; where they complete the sentence, I start their dialogue with another em-dash. I use ellipses for when the speaker has simply paused or stopped on their own accord. (Where it's clear that the meaning, if not the sentence, is complete, I add a full stop (period) to the ellipsis.)

The situation you describe is an example of the former, so I -- and I can't speak for anyone else -- would use em-dashes where the dialogue is first interrupted and where it resumes:

"Can you hear me? Something has happened up here. Jim's acting strangely, forcing---" Complete silence for a few seconds. "---attacked the doctor before he---" More silence. "---pulse cannon's disappeared."

 

[Nick B]

In the draft we have gone for elipses, due to them denoting missing parts. I can see however that em dashes would also work (they arn't interupted though exactly as they finish what they are saying, it simply doesn't come out the other end), I don't want to put in many descriptive lines where anything is missing though as it would interupt the flow too much due to the length of the scenes and amount of dialogue that is done on bad communications.

 

[thaddeus6th]

I probably would opt for ellipses.

 

[Ursa major]

(they arn't interupted though exactly as they finish what they are saying, it simply doesn't come out the other end)

It's interrupted by the time it gets to the PoV character's (and thus narrator's) end: as far as the narration is concerned, the flow of speech comes and goes and not because the speaker wants it to do so.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Definitely not sound effects ... or long dashes.

Most bad communications anyway isn't interference but the signal fading / cutting out. ... for fading and dashes for cutting out or interference is what I've seen.

 

[Nick B]

Thank you all very much, thats a couple of scenes that need some editing nicely when the beta's are finished.