Quotation Marks: How to Use Them

[Lafayette]

I have a character telling a story that takes more than six pages. In his telling he quotes other characters. I have been using double quotation marks for every paragraph he speaks and single quotation marks when he quotes a character in his story. And, I ended up employing double quotes and single quotes in many paragraphs. I find this hard on my eyes, which makes me wonder would this be hard on the eyes of my readers?

Is there a better way?

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

There's a similar sort of question here

Whats your favourite way of quoting other text inside your own prose?

Picture the scene, your main character has picked up a book or a file or a magazine and then reads it. I've had two thoughts about how to do this, one would be just have them read it out loud "Oh hey have you heard this? "The mating rituals of the lesser spotted Shy Bird are so rarely observed...

www.sffchronicles.com

 

[The Judge]

What you've done is the grammatically correct way, but as you've found it can sometimes be difficult to follow. Conrad, with his narrators telling stories, tends to do this.

What I've done in instances like this is to introduce a scene break and then tell the story without the narrator narrating it eg like here with this story in Kraxon Akiowa Finds Acceptance - Kraxon Magazine An alternative would be to put the narratorless story in italics to set it aside from the other text, though that can also get hard on the eyes if it's too long a story, which at 6 pages it's likely to be.

However, that technique works best when it is simply a story someone is telling ie like repeating a fairy tale. If it's a personal anecdote it means that it's harder -- if not impossible -- for the would-be narrator to interject him/herself into the story. In that case I'd suggest that instead of it being like a story you create a flashback, ie the narrator re-living the incident. When I've done that I've tended to use present tense to make it stand out from the surrounding past tense.

It's also not possible in either technique for the listeners to interject and ask questions (nor for there to be any stage business, of course, such as the narrator lighting his pipe or taking a drink). If you want that kind of thing during the telling then you'd have to keep with how you've got it, but in that case you need to make more of an effort to introduce breaks, and also to trim the story down so it doesn't run so long.

 

[sknox]

I was going to suggest Conrad, but The Judge beat me to it. Specifically, take a look at Lord Jim. Not sure a modern writer could manage that.

 

[vigorniensis]

Dialogue is always punctuated within double quotes. "........."
Quotes are always punctuated within single quotes. 'To Be Or Not To Be'
Never use italics to denote quoted speech (why? because it's impossible in handwritten articles).
Quoted speech within a dialogue is therefore:- "Jack said 'Are you still going?' "
This is the standard ENGLISH punctuation that I was taught 70 years ago in Worcester, England, and I see no reason to alter from this standard.

Yes, we all know that some in the modern generations have this thing, like dogs, of making their mark on the lamp-post and changing perfectly good rules. However, all this does is to achieve confusion where there was none.

[Another example of lamp-post marking was the British Meterological Office who, wanting to make their mark on the lamp-post decided that they would give new dates for the start of the seasons. This was total nonsense and absurd, and purely to help inflate somebody's tiny ego in the Met. Office. The same people did exactly the same with changing from Fahrenheit to Centigrade under no imperative from the Government, when everyone knew that Fahrenheit was a far better graduation system.]

 

[KiraAnn]

To the OP, I would first ask "Why?" Six pages seems excessive.

If you really want to pursue that, I would suggest making that story a separate chapter, so you can avoid nesting quotation marks.

 

[THX1138]

Welcome to Chronicles @vigorniensis!

 

[Wayne Mack]

Here is what my usual punctuation guide says.

Quotation marks | The Punctuation Guide

www.thepunctuationguide.com

British versus American style | The Punctuation Guide

www.thepunctuationguide.com

There a many different style guides available and they often have slightly different rules. I feel it is best to be self-consistent and find a guide that is easy to access when questions arise.