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Does your novel’s narrative have several consecutive snippets of dialogue that reflect a non-viewpoint character’s state of mind? If so, how do you punctuate them? And is there an alternative to using speech marks?
What’s in this post?
The difference between dialogue and narrative
Dialogue is the conversation between two or more characters. It’s what people say out loud and is often indicated by opening and closing quotation marks (or speech marks). Depending on your style of choice, these marks can be either singles ‘blah blah’ or doubles “blah blah”.
Narrative is the telling of the story – how an external narrator or viewpoint character reports on the events taking place in the novel. In the example below, the dialogue between the characters is in quotation marks. The surrounding text is narrative, and through it we learn what the viewpoint character – Milo – is thinking and what he can see and hear as the journey progresses.
Note the following:
Here’s how it might look using US English style:
Note the following:
Using speech snippets as a narrative device
Sometimes the narrative can include snippets of speech to inform readers about a character’s state of mind or a types of behaviours.
Although full sentences are used in the speech snippets, it’s not conventional dialogue. Rather, it’s narrating character’s recollection of utterances that give the reader a flavour of another character’s perspective. Here’s an example punctuated using British English style. Note the following:
And here’s an example punctuated using US English style, which some people might find a little trickier because of the question mark and the punctuation convention. In the three examples below:
Option 1: Allow the question mark to do the separating
Option 2: Recast so that the snippet with a question mark is at the end of the sentence
Option 3: Add a separating comma after the closing quotation mark to emphasize the separation
If you’re an editor who doesn’t have the scope to suggest a recast, I think Option 1 is fine. The question mark acts in place of a separating comma and avoids cluttering punctuation.
Option 3 indicates a clear separation but it’s a break from US-English style and clutters the paragraph with a comma that isn’t strictly needed. Using free indirect speech as an alternative
Free indirect speech (also called free indirect discourse) is an alternative that could work for writers worried about getting tangled up in how to punctuate snippets of direct speech in narrative.
Free indirect speech reads like direct first person dialogue but retains a third-person viewpoint. Here’s how it might work in our example.
Note how I’ve experimented with just a little italic for emphasis – old chap and our lot.
That’s so that although Milo is reporting the kinds of things he heard his boss say, the reader pays attention to the some of the tone of his boss’s voice and some of the language that Milo finds particularly grating. Keeping the text lean and engaging
It’s worth paying attention to how many dialogue snippets you’re using. If they’re in a single sentence of the narrative, there’s a risk the prose won’t flow well and the reader will get lost. In the example I provided above, there were four, and that’s probably about the limit.
So what should you do if you’re passing an editorial eye over a sentence with lots of snippets? Option 1: Can you create the same impact with fewer snippets? Check whether all those snippets need to be there. Are some of them conveying similar information? If that’s the case, could you retain only those necessary to convey the essence of the character’s thought processes to the reader? The example below has eight snippets.
Yes, Adamson might have uttered all of those statements, but capturing the essence of his mindset can be still achieved my omitting at least three of them.
I recommend you pick the utterances that are most powerful. That way, you'll ensure your reader remains engaged. Option 2: Create two sentences from one If editing out some dialogue snippets isn’t an option, try breaking the sentence into two.
Option 3: Mix up dialogue snippets and free indirect speech Another option is to combine two different literary tools – direct speech snippets and free indirect speech. Here’s how it might work.
Again, I experimented with just a little italic to draw attention to Adamson's tone and its grating effect on Milo, and added an action beat in parentheses to highlight Adamson's readiness to break the law.
This option ensures the use of direct speech isn’t overworked, and instead gives the reader a different way to access the information in the narrative about how Adamson’s mind works. Should the snippets be capitalized?
Whether or not you should capitalize the snippets is a style choice. I've chosen to capitalize them in the examples I provided because I wanted to indicate that this is how these full sentences would have been rendered if we'd been shown the actual conversation as it happened.
If I was dealing with partial dialogue, I'd approach the text as in the next example.
Summing up
Using snippets of direct dialogue as a narrative tool can be a superb way of conveying a non-viewpoint character’s mindset and behaviour.
However, writers and their editors need to ensure that readers won’t be tempted to skim. For that reason, pay attention to:
Related resources
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
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Want to know how to punctuate dialogue that’s interrupted midstream by an action beat? This post shows you one way of handling it in your fiction writing and editing practice.
What’s in this post?
What is dialogue?
Dialogue is the part of a novel that conveys character speech. It’s more usually set off by opening and closing quotation marks (or speech marks).
Depending on your style of choice, these marks can be either singles (‘blah blah’) or doubles (“blah blah”). It’s more common to see double quotation marks used for books written in US-English style, and single marks used for books written in British-English style, but this is a convention rather than a rule. Consistency is what authors and editors aim for, so make your choice and stick with it. What is an action beat?
An action beat is a short description that comes before, between or just after dialogue. It assists dialogue by telling readers about how a character interacts with their environment while they’re speaking, and is useful for showing rather than telling readers how a character is feeling.
That’s particularly useful when the narrative style is limited to the perspective of a single viewpoint character, a common and effective style of writing for many commercial fiction authors. Examples of dialogue with action beats
Below are three examples of character speech. Note how the action beats help ground the character in their environment and help the reader understand how that character is feeling.
In these examples, I’ve placed the action beats in the middle of the dialogue so you can focus on how the various beats I’ve chosen convey different emotions to the reader: frustration in the first, contemplation in the second, and boredom in the third.
Note that none of these action beats are interrupting the speaker midstream. When they do, the punctuation can become a little more challenging.
Midstream dialogue interruptions: Using dashes
When authors want to interrupt the speech midstream with an action beat, a common approach is to punctuate with parenthetical dashes.
This is not the law, not a rule, not the only way or the right way. It’s just the style that many publishers and independent authors choose to follow and that readers are used to seeing. Again, consistency is recommended so that readers aren’t unnecessarily distracted. Example 1 Here’s an example written in British-English style, using spaced en dashes and single quotation marks.
And here it is again in US-English style, using closed-up em dashes and double quotation marks.
Example 2 Here’s an example written in British-English style, using spaced en dashes and single quotation marks. This time we’re dealing with an additional punctuation mark: the ellipsis.
Which case to use: Upper or lower?
The action beats contained within the parenthetical dashes don’t start with a capital letter. Instead, the convention asks for lower case because the text is interrupting the dialogue midstream. Avoiding three consecutive punctuation marks
At one point In Example 2 above, there are three punctuation marks in a row: an ellipsis, a quotation mark, and a dash. That’s not something that would bother me because I can see the function each has:
However, some authors feel uncomfortable with multiple punctuation marks. If that’s you, you could try the following: 1. Remove the ellipsis and let the reader insert their own pause Without the ellipsis, it’s not as clear to the reader if the scrolling is happening at the same time as the character is speaking or if she takes a pause, but does it really matter? In this case, probably not.
2. Tell (rather than show) the pause If an author feels it’s absolutely necessary for the reader to know about the pause but doesn’t want to show it with an ellipsis, they could tell it (she paused). Some might consider this a less elegant solution – a little wordy perhaps – but most readers likely won’t bat an eyelid unless those told pauses and hesitations are littering a text.
Summing up
As always, bear in mind that punctuation conventions are useful and helpful ... until they mess with rhythm and mood. The guidance I’m offering is just that – guidance. It’s not a prescriptive set of rules you must follow.
If you want to interrupt dialogue midstream with action beats, try setting off the beat with dashes. The choice of whether to use single or double quotation marks and spaced en dashes or closed-up em dashes is the author’s (or the publisher’s). If you’re a freelance fiction editor, check what your client’s style preferences are. Once the style choice has been made, go for consistency so that readers can concentrate on immersing themselves in the story rather than untangling the punctuation. Related line-craft resourcesAbout Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Parentheses (or round brackets) can help fiction authors evoke a sense of simultaneity in their viewpoint character’s experience – one that challenges a more conventional linear narrative. Here’s how it works.
What’s included in this post
What are parentheses?
Parentheses come in pairs and separate a word or phrase from the surrounding text. If the parenthetical information is removed, the surrounding text still makes sense.
This is what they look like: ( ) Dashes and commas can perform the same function in fiction. Take a look at these examples: Parentheses: Tell me about parentheses (round brackets) and how they work. Commas: Tell me about parentheses, round brackets, and how they work. Spaced en dashes: Tell me about parentheses – round brackets – and how they work. Closed-up em dashes: Tell me about parentheses—round brackets—and how they work. Parentheses as convention breakers in fiction
All the examples above are grammatically correct, though parentheses are used far less frequently in contemporary commercial fiction.
This might be because they’re large and therefore visible marks – ones that demand a reader’s attention. That they’re interruptive could be a good reason to avoid them, though it could equally be the very reason why you want to use them. The key to using any punctuation mark effectively is to understand its purpose and consider how the reader will interpret it. And so just because the use of parentheses is infrequent enough in fiction to make it unconventional isn’t a reason to ban them from prose. Parentheses as satirical and viewpoint-switch markers
I most often see parentheses used in fiction in these two ways:
If you’d like to explore my analysis of these two uses, read How to use round brackets (parentheses) in fiction writing. Scroll through the comments on that post and you’ll see a fantastic question raised by a reader that got me thinking about parentheses again. The question an author posed
That reader is Ellen Gwaltney Bales, a fiction writer, and she said:
‘Louise, I'm writing a short story in which I have inserted a couple of parenthetical phrases (I don't even know what to call them) which separate one part of a sentence from another. I've seen Stephen King do this and it fascinated me. The character (narrator) is reflecting on a dream she has just awoken from. What do you think of this style, and what is it called?’ I replied admitting that I didn’t know quite what this is called in terms of literary style but that she’d got me thinking, and helped me consider a third function of parentheses that I hadn’t interrogated before: simultaneity. Here’s her example. It’s from a short story tentatively titled ‘The Woman at the Window’.
There are a couple of interesting things going on in Ellen’s example – not just the parenthetical phrase but also the placement of it. It takes its own line, which makes it stand out even more.
Why parentheses can convey simultaneity
I told Ellen that I liked her excerpt very much. The round brackets and the new line mean the phrase is certainly interruptive. And while I’d interpreted the effect of her choice of punctuation in a particular way, I was keen to understand what she’d hoped to achieve.
‘I wanted to shake the reader up a bit by writing it that way,’ she told me. And she succeeded. Parentheses do stand out. So does the separate line. But my reading of her work led me to consider another effect she’d created, albeit unwittingly – simultaneity. How readers process sentences in a linear fashion
Here’s another slightly edited excerpt from Ellen’s short story:
This is linear description. We absorb the story in the order the phrases are presented to us – first the dreaming, then the waking-up on a night just before Labor Day, then the terrified screaming, then seeing the exploding missiles, then the glare of the rockets, and finally the flaming sky.
But actually, that’s not how Ellen wrote it. Here’s the unedited version:
The rocket-glare phrase is now bracketed and takes its own line. And I think this changes that linearity subtly. It’s as if the glare of the rockets is experienced at the very same moment that the missiles are exploding. It’s another layer of experience that sits behind the explosions.
That’s how we often experience traumatic events in reality. Our brains work so fast that we process multiple pieces of information and feel multiple emotions all at once. The difficulty comes in expressing that in linear text. In Ellen’s example, the parentheses act as a signal of this simultaneity of experience, and show rather than tell an onslaught of emotional, auditory and visual information. Showing sensory assault through simultaneity
Let’s revisit Ellen’s first example and explore it through the lens of simultaneity.
The way the parenthetical phrase punctuates the prose makes me feel uncomfortable. It jars me visually. And that’s why I love it. It shows rather than tells the assault on the senses that I can imagine a person would experience if they were in an environment where missiles were exploding and falling around them.
The character awakes. She’s likely still shaken from the dream, and trying to process what she experienced. And so she narrates what she saw, which pared down is this:
But as she's thinking about this, the bursting bombs is there too, behind the more expository narration, right at the same time. And it’s the bracketed line that shows this.
An alternative might have been:
In that revised version, 'as' tells the simultaneity. It's told prose. Instead, Ellen as author, has shown us with the parentheses, and it's far more dramatic.
And so we might consider parenthetical statements such as this as devices that help authors create layers of simultaneous experience that are warranted when there’s sensory assault in play. Showing conflict through simultaneity
There’s another way in which you might use parentheses as a simultaneity device: to convey conflict.
Here’s an example that I have written more conventionally, using italic and a tag to convey a thought.
This approach encourages the reader to approach the prose in a linear way: First D texts Louise with an idea. Then a thought process takes place. Then Louise responds.
But look what happens when we experiment with parentheses.
Now there’s a signal that two conflicting emotional responses are in play simultaneously. Thinking ‘no’ and typing ‘yes’ are occurring at the same time.
Summing up
Using parentheses in fiction takes a little courage because they inevitably jar the reader, force them to step back and take notice. Some writers and editors fear that it’s a distraction too far, one that risks pulling their audience out of the prose and into how that prose is punctuated.
However, used purposefully, parentheses can enhance that moment and create a sense of simultaneity of experience – perhaps involving an assault on the senses or competing emotions fighting for primacy in a character’s mind. There are no rules in fiction. Instead, what writers (and the editors who work with them) must strive for is how best to communicate a character’s emotions, perception and actions in the moment, so that the reader can get under the skin of that experience. And it might just be that – once in a while – a pair of round brackets helps with that goal. Other resources you might like
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Learn about problematic language, the messages it might unintentionally convey, and how we can talk about the editorial conundrums we come across without judgement.
Embedding the language of preference in editorial discussion
Words are the professional editor’s business, yet the ones we use in the course of discussing how we apply our craft are all too often prescriptive.
Most editors, however experienced, encounter conundrums in their work that lead to their seeking advice from colleagues. Too often, the language of prescription is used to frame questions:
The problem with notions such as ‘right’, ‘correct’ and ‘rule’ is that they’re loaded. The implication is that there’s one way – a best way – to write and to edit. In reality, there are multiple ways to punctuate a sentence, each of which could alter its flow and rhythm in nuanced ways. There are multiple Englishes, too, each with grammatical and syntactical structures that vary from region to region within nations as well as from country to country. And there are multiple style guides that express particular preferences. All of which means there is no ‘correct’ way to punctuate a sentence, no ‘right’ grammar, and no ‘rule’ on hyphenation. What there are instead are conventions and choices that that can be implemented or ignored. Instead, we could ask:
The artistry of editing lies in helping the client craft prose in which the meaning is clear and interpreted as intended by readers. Embedding that principle – rather than the language of rights and rules – in the way we talk about our work means we’re more likely to think descriptively rather than prescriptively. Whose standards and conventions are in play?
There are myriad standards and conventions in language, ones that determine the following for example:
When we come across writing that doesn’t conform to these standards and conventions, some of us choose to refer instead to ‘non-standard’ language and ‘breaking from convention’ so as to avoid the judgement embodied in terms such as ‘right’, ‘best’, ‘correct’ and ‘rule’. It’s been my preference because I felt it was more neutral and framed the issue around reader expectation rather than my own lived experience of language. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about. Why? Because these terms, too, need to be used with caution. We need to be aware that while standards and conventions help readers make sense of the written and spoken word, they are created and enforced by those with advantage, those who have the power to deem them as standard and conventional in the first place, and to assert their primacy. That doesn’t make those standards and conventions better; it just means those who define them are in a position to do so. It also means that prose can be just as rich when those standards and conventions are ignored or flexed. What about style guides?
Individuals and organizations have preferences. For example, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), the University of Chicago Press and the American Psychological Association each have style guides that record their preferences for myriad stylistic decisions.
Mindful editing means remembering that these preferences aren’t ‘right’ or ‘better’. They’re certainly not rules. Even Oxford’s New Hart’s Rules isn’t a rulebook! Rather, these are useful guides that help editors and authors bring clarity and consistency to writing. However, editors – particularly those working on creative texts – need to be ready to bend when character and narrative voice would be damaged by prescriptive application of a style guide. As for those of us working on texts that deal with identity and representation, we need to be ready to question the advice in a published style guide; it might be behind the curve. Transferring judgement to the client
If we use the language of ‘right/’wrong’, ‘correct’/’incorrect’ and even ‘standard’/’non-standard’ when we talk to other editors about our work, there’s a risk that this will leak into the way we convey solutions to our clients, even into the way we edit their work.
An author might not write in sentences that follow grammar, spelling and punctuation conventions, but that in no way means they’re a poor crafter of prose. Perhaps the way they lay down words is because they haven’t learned our conventions. Or perhaps they’ve actively chosen to ignore those conventions because that style of language doesn’t suit their character and narrative voices. The mindful editor needs to recognize and respect both scenarios. Understanding which one is in play is critical because it will determine whether and which amendments are suggested, and why. ‘Wrong’, ‘non-standard’ or authentic voice?
Here’s an example that demonstrates how an author has chosen to craft a narrative that favours voice over ‘standard’ English now and then in order to reduce the distance between the narrator-protagonist and the reader.
These excerpts are from the opening chapter of Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me (pp 4–5; Penguin, 2017).
Are the words I placed in bold ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t.
Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 50-something middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have. Rather than thinking about these excerpts in terms of whether some of the words are non-standard or standard, instead we can evaluate them in terms of voice. Rich, evocative voice. Our first-person narrator has been accused of murder and has elected to defend himself. As the blurb on the back cover says: ‘He now stands in the dock and wants to tell you the truth. He needs you to believe him. Will you?’ Actually, it’s his authentic voice that draws me – a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England – deep into his psyche so that I can see and hear him as if we are one. And that means I can root for him, invest in him, care about him, believe him. Thinking about that narrative in terms of whether it’s ‘correct’ or ‘right’ would be butchery. To apply a digital red pen to it would be a crime. And even those of us who might apply the term ‘non-standard’ to the emboldened words must acknowledge that such prescription is based purely on our own lived experience of English – how we write, how we speak, and what we were taught. That doesn’t make our way of speaking and writing better or worthier. When story and characters drive language, readers will come along for the ride, regardless of their lived experience. When prescriptivism is behind the wheel, readers will disengage and find a different journey to take. Framing errors in terms of author intention and reader expectation
An error is a mistake. We all make them when we’re writing – because we don’t know what the conventions are, because we’re focusing on meaning rather than mechanics, or because our fingers are typing so fast.
Regardless, the focus here is on intention, and for that reason there are times when it’s appropriate for the editor to use the term ‘error’. When editors are tasked with finding errors, they’re looking for what wasn’t intended in that particular project. Take a look at these four examples:
We can say without judgement that there are four ‘errors’ in the above examples because in each case the author likely made a mistake – they meant to use a consistent style of speech marks in the first example, meant the pronouns to be consistent in the second, meant to use ‘they’re' in the third, and meant to use an alternative style for the nested quotation marks in the fourth. When we’re querying potential errors, however, we can still use the language of intention and reader expectation in our comments, thereby avoiding a more critical tone:
Summing up
As professional editors, we need to think about the language we use about language!
Instead, we can frame our discussions and queries around meaning, author intention and reader experience. That way, we’re putting the prose where it belongs – front and centre. About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Are you confused about when to add commas before coordinating conjunctions linking independent clauses? This post offers guidance and a few examples to show you the way.
Rules, convention and meaning
Some writers and editors love a rule. I’m not so keen on the language of ‘rules’ because it sets up a binary mindset that’s focused on ‘wrong’ versus ‘right’ rather than clarity of meaning. Instead, I prefer to think in terms of convention.
Grammatical conventions are useful and purposeful. They provide us with a common frame of reference that helps us communicate clearly through the written word. We can start by at least acknowledging the following:
Balancing convention and meaning
Writing and editing fiction requires deciding when to break with convention. But how do we work out what works and what doesn’t? Here’s how I frame the balancing act:
Punctuation should serve meaning as long as that doesn’t butcher rhythm. Rhythm should serve emotion as long as that doesn’t butcher understanding. Both should serve the reader and the story rather than the style manual and the grammar book. So how does that apply to commas, coordinating conjunctions and independent clauses? What are coordinating conjunctions?
Coordinating conjunctions are words that join other words or groups of words of equal weight. You might see them referred to in short as FANBOYS:
F = for A = and N = nor B = but O = or Y = yet S = so What are independent clauses?
Independent clauses are groups of words that can stand as a sentence on their own and still make sense. They include a subject and a predicate.
Subjects are people/things that are doing something or being something – the noun (the thing) and the adjectival information describing that noun. The four examples given below are all subjects.
Predicates are what they’re doing – the verb (the doing word) and the thing the verb’s acting on. The four examples below are all predicates.
Joining subjects and predicates gives us independent clauses. Here are two simple examples (subject in bold; predicate underlined).
The comma convention
If two or more independent clauses in a sentence are joined by a coordinating conjunction, it’s conventional to place a comma before that conjunction.
EXAMPLE AND EVALUATION #1 In the following example, the independent clauses are in bold.
The independent clauses could stand on their own as complete sentences and be understood perfectly well. Let’s revisit our balancing act and assess the impact of the comma.
The degree to which the comma serves meaning here is, I think, debatable. This is what it looks like without the comma:
There’s no ambiguity there, and so one could argue that insisting on a comma would be grammatical pedantry. An editor would struggle to justify adding a comma for any other reason than ‘that’s the rule’ or 'I think it looks better' because the meaning is perfectly clear.
Could someone argue that the comma enforces the equal weighting of the independent clauses lying either side of the coordinating conjunction? Yes in that it acts as a separator of two ideas: the dog’s colour and what it’s doing to its paws; the one isn't related to the other. And so I certainly wouldn’t remove it if it were already in place; there’s no justification for such an action. MORE COMPLEX CONSTRUCTIONS Many sentences in fiction are more complex. If our example looked like this, we might have a sounder justification for adding the comma:
She stops in the doorway and holds her breath. She’s found it. The dog is pale yellow and it's licking its paws and nipping at the bloodied fur around the wound.
In the revised example below, I think applying the conventional punctuation helps. The rhythm is moderated – we take a little breath when we reach the comma – and experience (through our viewpoint character’s eyes) first the colour of the dog and then what it’s doing and why.
The two ideas have a starker separation, and the punctuation convention supports that meaning.
She stops in the doorway and holds her breath. She’s found it. The dog is pale yellow, and it's licking its paws and nipping at the bloodied fur around the wound.
EXAMPLE AND EVALUATION #2
Here’s an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive (Orion, 2003, p. 355). Once more, both independent clauses are in bold.
The independent clauses could stand on their own as complete sentences and be understood perfectly well. Again, let’s revisit our balancing act and assess the impact of the comma.
I think the comma serves meaning and is necessary. Without it, we might start to read the sentence as if the slug would shatter not just a skull but another life too. That’s not what Ludlum is saying. Instead, we’re alerted that another idea is coming into play. A trip-up here means the reader would have to fix the grammar in their head and reread the sentence to make sense of it. That’s a momentary distraction no writer wants. Breaking with convention in fiction
Let’s have a look at when we might ignore grammatical convention.
Below is a short scene I’ve made up. Our protagonist is a forty-year-old woman having a nightmare about a past event.
There are three independent clauses (and the start of a fourth) linked by a coordinating conjunction. The ‘rule’ says there should be a comma before all those ‘and’s. EVALUATION A pro fiction editor would want to think twice before they start adding in commas because of some rule or other.
Using anaphora doesn’t mean we have to ignore commas, far from it. But what would introducing them do to rhythm and mood? I think the lack of commas helps us to feel our way under the skin of that dream-child because young children in a panic don’t introduce pauses or moderate their speech according to a style manual or a grammar guide. Instead, words fly from their mouths like tiny storms. What we have instead is the sense of terrified disorientation being experienced by the dreamer, one that’s shown rather than told. Commas would moderate the pace and separate the ideas contained in each independent clause; omitting them means we’re offered a stream of terrified consciousness. More exceptions
Some grammarians do allow for an exception when the independent clauses are short and closely related.
In the examples that follow, the coordinating conjunctions are underlined; notice the absence of the preceding comma. Sense isn’t marred because of the missing punctuation.
It’s an eminently sensible exception – one that allows for decluttering but also avoids a separation of ideas that isn’t appropriate.
Summing up
The grammatical convention of placing a comma before a coordinating conjunction linking independent clauses is helpful and useful. However, sometimes we can omit those commas:
Style and grammar resources offer guidance, and we should use them, but only in so far as they serve the reader and the story, not because we are rule enforcers. That’s nothing more than a road to literary butchery.
More resources to help you line edit with confidence
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Here's how to use quote marks (or speech marks) according to publishing convention in your fiction writing. The guidance covers both US English and UK English conventions.
In this post ...
What quote marks are used for
Quote marks are used in 3 ways in fiction:
Character dialogue Quote marks show that we’re reporting what someone else is saying or said. Each new speaker's dialogue should appear on a new line and include opening and closing quote marks. Here's an example from The Word is Murder (p. 208) by Anthony Horowitz, Arrow 2018.
To distance the narrator from what's being reported
The tone of the distancing rendered by the quote marks will depend on narrative intent. Perhaps the voice is sarcastic. Or the author might want the reader to suspend belief by indicating that a character considers a word or phrase unreliable. Imagine the character is saying so-called or supposed or allegedly before the word in quotes.
A word of caution: Don't be tempted to differentiate distancing terms in the narrative from dialogue by using an alternate style. If there are double speech marks around the dialogue, there should be double marks around the distancing words.
NON-STANDARD (USING DOUBLES AS BASE STYLE):
STANDARD (USING DOUBLES AS BASE STYLE):
To denote song titles and other works
Quote marks are also used to identify certain published works such as song titles and book chapter titles. So, for example, if a writer is referring to an album or book title, this is rendered in italic. However, when it comes to a song on an album, or a chapter in a book, it's conventional to use quote marks.
Omitting a closing quote mark in dialogue
There's one occasion where it's acceptable to omit the closing speech mark in dialogue: same speaker, new paragraph.
So, if you want your dialogue to take a new paragraph while retaining the current speaker, use a quotation mark at start of the new line but omit the closing one at the end of the previous paragraph. Here's an example from The Bat (p. 251) by Jo Nesbo, Vintage, 2013.
Single versus double quote marks
There’s no rule, just convention.
There are lots of Englishes: US, UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, etc. Each has its own preferences and idiosyncrasies. Focus on which English your audience will expect, and punctuate your writing accordingly. Whichever style you choose, the main thing is be consistent.
The first example below is from Sleeping in the Ground (p. 261) byPeter Robinson, Hodder & Stoughton, 2017. The second is from The Fix (p. 428) by David Baldacci, Pan Books, 2017.
If you choose double quote marks, use the correct symbol, not two singles.
Straight versus curly quote marks
Curly quote marks are more conventionally known as smart quotes.
It’s conventional in mainstream publishing to use smart or curly quotation marks, not unidirectional ones. 
Changing straight quotes to smart quotes is one of the initial clean-up jobs an editor will carry out when they start work on a file. To prevent the problem occurring from the minute you begin typing:
If you’ve pasted material into your book from elsewhere, or you didn’t check autocorrect options before you began typing, there might be some rogue unidirectional marks in your file. To change them quickly, do a global find/replace:
The closing quote mark in relation to other punctuation
In fiction, punctuation related to dialogue is placed similarly whether you're writing in US or UK style: within the quote marks.
Here are some examples:
However, there's a difference when it comes to distancing or cited works. Note the different placement of the commas and full stops in the US and UK examples. In US English, the commas come before the closing quotation marks; in UK English, they come after.
When not to use quote marks
There are 2 issues to consider here:
Thoughts CMOS at section 13.43 says you can use quote marks to indicate thought, imagined dialogue and other internal discourse if you want to. However, I recommend you don't. For one thing, I can’t remember the last time I saw this approach used in commercial fiction coming out of a mainstream publisher’s stable. But the best reason for not putting thoughts in quote marks is because it might confuse your reader. The beauty of quote marks – or speech marks – is that they indicate speech. Let them do their job! Emphasis It can be tempting to use quote marks in your writing to draw attention to a word or phrase, but it’s rarely necessary and could even have the opposite effect to what you intended. It works instead as a distancing tool, as discussed above. If you’re tempted to use quote marks for emphasis, imagine saying the sentence out loud, and making air quotes with your fingers as you speak. Would your character/narrator say it like that? If the answer's no, leave out the quote marks. Italic will work better. Or recast your dialogue so that the reader can work out where to place the stress themselves. Summing up
If in doubt about how to use quote marks for your book, consult a style manual. I recommend the Chicago Manual of Style, the Penguin Guide to Punctuation and New Hart’s Rules, all of which offer industry-standard guidance.
Fancy listening instead?
If you'd prefer to listen to the advice offered here, Denise Cowle (a non-fiction editor) and I chat about how to use quote marks in all types of writing on The Editing Podcast. You can listen right here or via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast platform
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Round brackets, or parentheses, crop up less frequently than many punctuation symbols in fiction writing, but that doesn’t mean we must ban them. This post explores two ways to make them work effectively.
What are round brackets?
This is what they look like: ( )
They always come in pairs, and act as alternatives to paired dashes or commas in fiction. They have other functions in non-fiction writing but I’ll leave that discussion to a non-fiction editor! Compare these examples:
All of the above are grammatically correct, though paired brackets (like dashes) are stronger than commas, and more interruptive to the eye than both commas and dashes, probably because they’re used less frequently and associated more with non-fiction work.
Every writer will do well to ask themselves how their choice of parenthetical styling will affect the rhythm and clarity of their prose. Every writer will also do well to ask themselves whether readers will be annoyed by them. Like serial commas, adverbs and the singular they, round brackets rarely pass a reader or an editor without evoking opinion. More on that later. Brackets, full points and capitalization
Regardless of which English you’re using – British or American, for example – the rule is the same:
If the bracketed information is included as part of a sentence, the full point comes after the closing bracket. The bracketed clause takes a lower-case initial letter unless it starts with a proper noun.
If the bracketed information stands as a sentence in its own right, the full point comes before the closing bracket. The bracketed sentence takes an initial capital.
Danger, Will Robinson!
Round brackets in fiction garner strong opinion, usually negative.
The most-cited reason I’ve seen – and it’s a valid one – is that they pull readers out of a story. Given that there’s no reason on earth why you’d want to pull a reader out of a story, tread carefully. Still, given that they’re not grammatically wrong, it’s only right that we should consider the ways in which round brackets might work in your fiction. The two I’ve seen most often are as follows:
Round brackets in fiction: Satire
For an example of how round brackets can be used for satirical purposes, we need look no further than Dickens.
In Our Mutual Friend (Wordsworth Editions, 1997), the viewpoint is omniscient. The scene is an ostentatious banquet hosted by the Veneerings. Dickens uses round brackets to set off narrative asides that poke fun at the guests and show them as the bumptious fools he believes them to be – and wants us to. Here’s an excerpt from p. 11:
In other words, the crest is a farce.
And one of the diners, a Mr Twemlow, is obsessed over whether he is Veneering’s ‘oldest friend’, though he would never admit to being bothered by such a thing. Dickens’s bracketed snipe (p. 12) leaves us in no doubt about the man’s snobbery; it interrupts the dialogue of Lady Tippins, a frightful show-off whose ‘my dear’ sends Twemlow into a tizzy:
This approach is unlikely to find favour with readers who bought your high-octane thriller expecting a rollercoaster ride. The external narrator’s voice is overwhelming, and in most contemporary commercial fiction it will slow readers down, drag them out of the story, and infuriate them.
Round brackets in fiction: Viewpoint shifts
Take a look at this example from Stephen King’s The Outsider (p. 252; Hodder, 2018):
The brackets are effective here precisely because they’re interruptive. The narrative viewpoint in this section is third-person; we see the world as Holly, the private investigator, experiences it.
Given that it’s third-person, our finding out something that Holly hasn’t considered shifts the narrative distance. Such a shift might jar under other circumstances because it yanks us out of Holly’s head. King, however, is a master of viewpoint, and he writes his characters with a rich immediacy. Still, he finds ways to introduce flexibility seamlessly, and in this case it’s with round brackets to introduce his omniscient narrator. The parentheses allow an external narrator to enter the story just for a moment – an all-seeing eye that tells us what Holly didn’t think – but that voice is cocooned safely within those round brackets, and is gone as soon as the reader’s eye passes over the closing symbol. King’s an experienced writer. If you’re not, I recommend holding a single character viewpoint and steering clear of bracketed interruptions from another narrator. Here are four ways we could recast the King excerpt:
Spaced en dash
With that taken care of, Holly went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a light meal – no way was she paying room-service prices. Closed-up em dash With that taken care of, Holly went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a light meal—no way was she paying room-service prices. Semicolon With that taken care of, Holly went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a light meal; no way was she paying room-service prices. Full point With that taken care of, Holly went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a light meal. No way was she paying room-service prices. Round brackets in fiction: Dialogue
In Fix Your Damn Book! How to Painlessly Self-Edit Your Novels & Stories (Gift Horse Productions, 2016), James Osiris Baldwin advises never using round brackets in dialogue because they break ‘the fourth wall’.
What’s the fourth wall? It’s originally a theatrical term but in our case refers to the imaginary barrier between the characters and the audience. It’s good advice. It makes no sense to give an external narrator space inside a character’s speech. That’s why in the earlier Dickens example, the interruption comes between the speech-marked dialogue rather than within it. Summing up
There’s nothing grammatically wrong with using round brackets. Stylistically, however, they could be a misfire. If you use them in your fiction, think care and rare: understand the impact they have on story and viewpoint, and use them infrequently.
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Are your hyphens, en dashes and em dashes giving you the run-around? Here’s a guide to conventional usage in UK and US fiction publishing.
Terminology
Dashes are sometimes referred to as ‘rules’, especially in the UK. Oxford’s New Hart’s Rules (NHR) refers to the ‘en rule’ and the ‘em rule’ whereas The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) discusses ‘en dashes’ and ‘em dashes’.
Both terms are acceptable but I’ll use ‘dash’ in this article. A word on exceptions
Take a look at the likes of CMOS and you’ll see plenty of exceptions to the rules, which is why I don’t much like rules when it comes to fiction editing! What I’ve given you here is what I think you’ll need to know most of the time for most of your novel writing.
What do the dashes look like?
There are four dashes you’re most likely to use in fiction:
Dashes that set off text and replace alternative punctuation
The EN DASH and the EM DASH can be used to set off an augmenting or explanatory word or phrase in a sentence that could stand alone without the insertion.
Brackets, commas and colons can act as alternative forms of punctuation. Here are some examples that demonstrate how it could be done:
In the UK, it’s conventional to use a SPACED EN DASH. This is not the law, not a rule, not the only way or the right way. It’s just the style that many UK publishers choose, though not all.
Here’s an example from my version of Stephen King’s The Outsider (p. 171):
In the US, it’s conventional to use a CLOSED-UP EM DASH. Again, this is not the law, not a rule, not the only way or the right way. It’s just the style that many US publishers choose, though not all.
Here’s what King’s sentence looks like when amended according to US convention:
Some style guides even ask for SPACED EM DASHES, though I see this usage less frequently:
I recommend you stick to spaced en dashes or closed-up em dashes in fiction because that’s what your readers will be most familiar with. As for which style you should choose, think about:
If you’re publishing internationally, pick one style and be consistent. Dashes in number spans
In fiction, number spans are often written out, though again this is convention rather than a rule that must be adhered to. Number ranges might make their way into emails, texts, letters and reports in your story, and they’re perfect for date ranges.
A CLOSED-UP EN DASH between number spans is standard in publishing, whether you’re writing in British English or US English:
Note that the en dash means up to and including (or through in US English).
CMOS and NHR both recommend using EITHER the closed-up en dash in a number range OR a from/to or between/and construction, but not a mixture of the two:
Dashes as alternative speech marks
The CLOSED-UP EM DASH can act as an alternative to speech marks (or quotation marks) in dialogue in both UK English and US English.
Sylvain Neuvel uses this technique in Sleeping Giants (the excerpt below is from the Kindle edition) and it works because the scenes in which it occurs take place in a secret location with an anonymous (even to the reader) agent running the interrogation. Each speaker’s turn is indicated with an em dash. The agent’s speech is rendered in bold.
It can be an effective tool for fiction that’s dialogue driven – almost like a screenplay – but it gets messy when there are more than two speakers in a conversation, and becomes unworkable if you want to ground your dialogue in the environment with narrative (action beats, for example). And, of course, the dialogue needs to be standout because that’s all there is.
Dashes that indicate end-of-line interruptions
To indicate that a speaking character has been interrupted, use a CLOSED-UP EM DASH, whether you’re publishing in US or UK English.
Here’s an example from Mick Herron’s Dead Lions (p. 115)::
And another from Linwood Barclay’s Parting Shot (p. 380):
Dashes for dialogue interrupted by narrative description
Dashes offer clarity when dialogue is broken by narrative description and the speaker hasn’t finished talking.
Here’s how it could be rendered in US English using CLOSED-UP EM DASHES:
And if you’re following UK English convention, use SPACED EN DASHES:
Notice how I’ve also used double quotation marks in the US version and singles for the UK one. Again, this isn’t about being right or obeying a rule; it’s a convention, and one that’s not always adhered to. Consistency is king.
Dashes that indicate faltering speech
If your character is out of breath, taken aback, caught off guard, frightened, or nervous, you might want to indicate faltering speech with punctuation.
There are no absolute rules about how you do this; it depends on the effect you want to achieve. If you want to denote a staccato rhythm, HYPHENS are a good choice. This works for sharper faltering where the character stammers or stutters. If the faltering related not to letters but to phrases, you could use a CLOSED-UP EM DASH (US style) or a SPACED EN DASH (UK style). Ellipses are another option. They're not dashes but they're handy for faltered speech that has a pause in it. You can use these with your dash of choice.
Hyphens (staccato):
Closed-up em dash for faltering phrasing (US style):
Spaced en dash for faltering phrasing (UK style):
Ellipses for pauses (in conjunction with dashes):
Dashes as separators
HYPHENS are the tool of choice here. They’re short and sharp, and are perfect in fiction when you want to spell out words or numbers:
Number separation comes in handy when you want to ensure your reader reads the numbers as distinct digits rather than inclusively. Compare 1918 (nineteen eighteen) with 1-9-1-8 (one, nine, one, eight).
Dashes that indicate connection, relation or an alternative
We use EN DASHES in place of to and and/or to show a connection between two words that can stand alone and that together are modifying a noun:
Dashes with adjectival compounds
Either EN DASHES or HYPHENS are used here, regardless of where you live.
When one adjective modifies another adjective, these words create a compound. If this compound is placed before a noun, it usually takes a HYPHEN for the purpose of clarity. When the compound comes after the noun and a linking verb, the hyphen can be omitted:
Care should be taken, even in fiction, with regard to weighting. Let’s revisit the example of our polyglot Amir. Consider the differences between the following:
In the first example, with an EN DASH, Amir’s Asianness and Britishness have equal weighting. In the second, with the HYPHEN, ‘Asian’ is modifying ‘British’ and carries less weight. In the third and fourth, where the dashes are omitted, the weighting is ambiguous.
The dash of choice (or its omission) can tell us something about Amir’s identity – how he, or the narrator, or the author perceives this – so it needs to be used purposefully and mindfully. Dashes indicating omission
You might want to omit words, fully or partially, because they’re profane, or to indicate that some of the letters are illegible, or to disguise a name.
There are several options for managing omission: em dashes, 2em dashes, en dashes and asterisks. Spacing comes into play. There are different conventions for US and UK style. NHR recommends the following for UK style:
To indicate partial omission of a word, and the number of letters that have been omitted, choose the SPACED EN DASH (or unspaced asterisks):
To indicate partial omission of a word with a single mark, choose the CLOSED-UP EM DASH:
To indicate complete omission of a word with a single mark, choose the SPACED EM DASH:
CMOS recommends the following for US style:
To indicate partial omission of a word, choose a CLOSED-UP 2EM DASH:
To indicate complete omission of a word, choose the SPACED 2EM DASH:
Summing up
Using dashes purposefully, and according to publishing convention, will bring clarity to your fiction writing. Think about your audience and what they’re used to seeing on the page, then choose your style and apply it consistently.
Consider, too, whether your choice of dash will amplify or reduce the significance (or weight) of your words when you’re using dashes as connectors or modifiers. And if you’re still bamboozled, ask a pro editor. We know our dashes! About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Semi-colons are disliked by some, misused by others, and avoided by many. If you want to keep them out of your writing, that’s fine. In this article, I show you how they work conventionally. That way, you can omit them because that’s your preference, not because you daren’t include them!
What is a semi-colon?
It’s one of these:
;3 ways to use a semi-colon
There are 3 situations in which you’re likely to use a semi-colon in fiction:
Here, I focus on parallelism and clarity, but sentence pacing comes into play too – a useful addition to any fiction writer’s toolbox. A little bit of grammar
Above, I mentioned independent clauses. An independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a predicate. In case you don’t know what they are – and many writers know how to write extremely well without knowing grammar terminology so there’s no shame in that – here’s an overview.
Subject A subject is the thing in a sentence that’s doing something or being something. In the examples below, the subject is in bold.
If you’re not sure what the subject of your sentence is, try this trick: change the subject into a question that you can answer yes/no to, as in the examples below.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Predicate
A predicate is the part of a sentence that contains a verb and that tells us something about what the subject’s doing or what they are. In the examples below, the predicate is in bold.
If you’re not sure what the predicate is in a sentence that’s a question, turn it into a statement, as in the example below. The result might be clunky but it’ll show you what’s what. The subject is in bold and the predicate in italic.
Independent clauses
Quick recap: an independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a predicate. The subject is in bold, the predicate is in italic, and the full independent clause is in red.
Parallelism and the semi-colon
Take a look at these two independent clauses.
The second sentence is related to the first because the gravel that’s digging into the agent’s elbows is what she experiences after falling to the ground. We can therefore use a semi-colon to indicate this relationship, if we wish.
Note that the first word of the clause after the semi-colon does not take an initial capital letter. Could we use a colon? A colon is non-standard because colons introduce additional/qualifying information about the first clause, not new information. Think of the information they introduce as subordinate, if it helps. I recommend avoiding colons to join parts of a sentence that are equally weighted.
Non-standard – new information (AVOID)
The FBI agent fell to the ground: the gravel dug into her elbows.
Standard – qualifying information
The FBI agent fell onto something sharp: gravel.
Standard – qualifying information
The FBI agent pulled out her gun: a Glock.
Could we use a comma?
A comma is non-standard when joining two independent clauses. Sentences using commas in this way are said to contain comma splices. I recommend avoiding this usage.
Non-standard – new information (AVOID)
The FBI agent fell to the ground: the gravel dug into her elbows.
Standard – qualifying information
The FBI agent fell onto something sharp: gravel.
Standard – qualifying information
The FBI agent pulled out her gun: a Glock. Clarity and the semi-colon
Heavily punctuated sentences can be confusing and clunky. For the reader, it can mean limping through your prose rather than moving at a pace dictated by narrative intent.
Take a look at this example from Mick Herron’s Dead Lions, p. 88. There are two semi-colons in the original version, but for this example I’m focusing only on the first (see the section in bold). Original with semi-colon
1. Amended with en dash
2. Amended with comma
The en dash in the first alternative version looks awkward because we already have two parenthetical en dashes in play.
What happens if we introduce a comma instead? The sentence is already comma-heavy. All we’ve done is bring in yet another to muddy the waters. The semi-colon works best. It effectively links the clauses it connects, but in a way that subdivides the sentence clearly. However, pacing comes into place here too. There’s more on pacing below but, for now, compare the original and the version amended with a comma. The creepy voyeurism is starker when set off by the semi-colon. More on pacing and the semi-colon
The semi-colon is harder than the comma. It lengthens the pause or increases the distance between two clauses that could have been linked with a comma, making them both stand out.
The semi-colon is softer than the full point. It shortens the pause or reduces the distance between two clauses that could have been linked with a full point, indicating a stronger, more intimate relationship. Back to Herron for a closer look at the second semi-colon (see the section in bold) and some alternatives we could try: Original
1. Amended with comma
In the original, the semi-colon acts as a super-comma, subdividing the whole sentence into two more readable chunks.
However, more marked is the impact on the pace. The semi-colon forces us to slow down. That’s important because the clause that comes after it is about the denial of interrogations. The semi-colon makes us pause a little longer, which makes the sinister information that follows stand out. Semi-colons and dialogue
Some authors resist the use of semi-colons in dialogue, usually on the grounds that the reader can’t hear the punctuation. Does that mean you shouldn’t use them?
A novel’s dialogue isn’t real-life speech; it’s a representation of it. Speech, like narrative, has rhythm. The writer’s job is to create speech that’s clear and well paced. If a semi-colon helps you to do that, why wouldn’t you use it? Here’s a great example from David Rosenfelt’s New Tricks, p. 316: Original
Amended with full point
Both versions work but Rosenfelt elects to use a semi-colon because he wants to show the relationship between the two independent clauses. A full point would pull the clauses a little further apart and reduce the intimacy between them.
Should you use semi-colons in your fiction?
Some authors prefer to omit semi-colons for a variety of reasons: they're deemed pretentious, confusing, interruptive or ugly. But I’m not sure we should judge them so harshly:
Further reading and cited works
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
Apostrophes confound some authors. Not knowing how to use them doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, but getting them wrong can distract a reader and alter the meaning of what you want to say. This guide shows you how to get it right.
What does an apostrophe look like?
The apostrophe is the same mark as a closing single quotation mark: ’ (unicode 2019).
This is worth remembering when you use them in your fiction to indicate the omission of letters at the beginning of a word. More on that further down. What do apostrophes do?
Apostrophes have two main jobs:
1. To indicate possession 2. To indicate omission And sometimes a third (though this is rarer and only applies to some expressions): 3. To indicate a plural 1. Indicating possession
The English language doesn’t have one set of rules that apply universally. However, when it comes to possessive apostrophes, the following will usually apply:
Add an apostrophe after the thing that is doing the possessing.
Possessive apostrophes and names
Names can be tricky. The most common problem I see is authors struggling to place the apostrophe correctly when family names are being used in the possessive case, even more so when the name ends with an s.
Here are some examples of standard usage to show you how it’s done: 
Note that in the Melanie Fields singular-possession example, there are two options. Both are correct but some readers will find the second more difficult to pronounce because there are three s's a row.
Hart’s Rules (4.2.1 Possession) has this advice: 'An apostrophe and s are generally used with personal names ending in an s, x, or z sound […] but an apostrophe alone may be used in cases where an additional s would cause difficulty in pronunciation, typically after longer names that are not accented on the last or penultimate syllable.’ If you're unsure whether to apply the final s in a case like this, use common sense. Read it aloud to see if you can wrap your tongue around it, and decide whether the meaning is clear. Then choose the version that works best and go for consistency across your file. Pedantry shouldn't trump prescriptivism in effective writing. 2. Indicating omission
Indicating omission when one word is created from two
In fiction, we often use contracted forms of two words to create a more natural rhythm in the prose, particularly in dialogue. The apostrophes indicate that letters (and spaces) have been removed. Common examples include: 
Indicating omission at the beginning, middle and end of single words
We can use an apostrophe to indicate that a letter is missing at the end of a word (dancing – dancin’), the middle of a word (cannot – can’t) and the beginning of a word (horrible – ’orrible). Start-of-word letter omissions are commonly used in fiction writing to indicate informal speech or a speaker’s accent. Make sure you use the correct mark. Microsoft Word automatically inserts an opening single quotation mark (‘) when you type it at the beginning of a word because it assumes you’re using it as a speech indicator. Apostrophes are ALWAYS the closing single quotation mark (’) so do double check if you’re indicating omission at the start of a word. 
Indicating omission in numbers and dates
Plural numbers don’t usually require an apostrophe because there’s no ambiguity. In fiction writing, it’s common to spell out numbers for one hundred and below, but even when numerals are used, no apostrophe is needed for plurals. 
Omission-indicating apostrophes at the beginning of dates are acceptable according to some style manuals. In the example below, the 1970s is abbreviated. It’s conventional in UK writing to follow the NHR example below.
In fiction, however, you can avoid the issue by spelling out the dates. This is universally acceptable, and my preference when writing and editing fiction. 
3. Indicating a plural with an apostrophe
When indicating the plural of lower-case letters – for example, if you want to refer to two instances of the letter a – it’s essential to use an apostrophe because the addition of only an s will lead to confusion.
In the non-standard examples below, you can see how the plurals (in bold) form complete words, resulting in ambiguity. 
For that reason, it’s considered standard to use an apostrophe (see The Chicago Manual of Style Online 7.15 and New Hart’s Rules 4.2.2).
When indicating the plural of upper-case letters, the apostrophe would be considered non-standard because there’s no ambiguity. 
Avoiding erroneous apostrophes and possessive pronouns
Possessive pronouns are the bane of the apostrophe novice’s writing life, especially its!
The following possessive pronouns NEVER need an apostrophe: hers, theirs, yours and its.
If you’re unsure whether to insert an apostrophe in its, say it out loud as it is. If it makes sense, you need an apostrophe; if it doesn’t, you don’t! 
Avoiding erroneous apostrophes in plural forms
The apostrophe novice can fall into the trap of creating plural forms of nouns by adding an apostrophe before the final s.
Summing up
I hope you’ve found this overview useful. It isn’t exhaustive – there are entire books about apostrophes. Fucking Apostrophes is one of my favourites.
However, when it comes to fiction writing, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to worry about more than the basics covered here. If you’re stuck on where to stick your apostrophe, feel free to ask me for guidance in the comments. Further reading
Want to revisit this information quickly? Visit the Books and Videos page in my resource library to download this free booklet. About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
This post shows you how you can use commas and conjunctions to alter the rhythm of a sentence. Changing the rhythm can help your readers immerse themselves deeper in the mood of your narrative and the emotions of your characters.
Standard grammar advice
Standard grammar advice – the stuff we learned when we were kids – calls for lists with three or more items (or phrases or clauses) in a sentence to be separated by a comma, and for a conjunction to be inserted before the final item:
Or, if your preference is to use the serial (or Oxford comma):
The use of this one conjunction is called syndeton, and it moderates the pace. When it comes to fiction, standard grammar works very well for the most part. However, there are other accepted literary devices you can use to help your readers feel the scene you’ve written in a different way: asyndeton and polysyndeton. I’ve used examples from crime fiction in this article but the principles apply across genres. More on syndetic constructions
Syndeton is everywhere. It’s the most oft-used way of constructing a sentence with multiple clauses, and it works well because it aids clarity: this thing, that thing and that other thing.
Here’s an excerpt from At Risk by Stella Rimington (p. 369):
And here’s an example from Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole thriller, The Bat (p. 250):
The second excerpt is taken from a chapter in which the head of the crime squad, Neil McCormack, delivers a long speech to the protagonist, Harry Hole. Harry has just spent nearly an hour delivering his own monologue, updating McCormack on everything that’s happened so far.
The mood of the entire scene is one of contemplation and resignation. The characters give each other the space to talk without rushing. Their behaviour feels controlled, and the way they talk is measured. The grammatical structure of the sentence (syndetic) is a good choice because it moderates the speed at which we read, and reflects the mood. Omitting conjunctions – asyndeton
Authors might choose on occasion to change the mood of a sentence by deliberately removing the conjunction. Separating all the items with only commas accelerates the rhythm.
That speeding-up can have a variety of effects:
Let’s go back to the Nesbo example and see what happens when we change it:
By omitting the conjunction and inserting a comma, a sense of frustration and urgency is introduced. It’s subtle, certainly, but that’s the beauty of it.
If Nesbo had wanted to convey more immediacy, he could have elected to make these small changes. They would have altered the rhythm and showed (without spelling it out) that McCormack’s tone had changed or the pace of his speech had increased. Here are two examples from Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive (p. 274 and p. 355):
In the example above, Ludlum could have introduced ‘and’ after/instead of the final comma of the first sentence with no detrimental effects, but I think its omission brings a sense of urgency and determination to the writing that reflects the tension of the scene.
In the excerpt below, he uses asyndeton to evoke a sense of futility, frustration and anger. The reader is forced to become bogged down in the senseless loss of life from a bullet to the head:
Asyndetic constructions can be particularly effective in noir and hardboiled crime fiction. These genres don’t shy away from the dark underbelly of their settings. The characters are often as damaged as the gritty environments they work within, and a sense of hollowness and futility underpins the novels.
Here’s an excerpt from The Little Sister (p. 177) by the king of hardboiled, Raymond Chandler:
Imagine that second sentence with ‘and’ after (or instead of) the final comma. It would ruin the flow and remove the utter sense of despair and hopelessness. Chandler doesn’t overdo it though. He saves his use of the asyndetic for the right moments rather than littering his pages with it.
Using multiple conjunctions – polysyndeton
Another technique for altering rhythm is that of using multiple conjunctions. Polysyndetic constructions are interesting in that they can work both ways:
In the following example, Chandler (p. 103) shows us two different groups of people waiting in a reception area that the main character, Philip Marlowe, has entered. By using a conjunction between each adjective describing the hopefuls, he enhances the brightness of their mood. This in turn tells us more than Chandler gives us in terms of words about the other group. We can imagine their boredom and frustration:
There’s a powerful example of the polysyndetic in Kate Hamer’s The Girl in the Red Coat (p. 151). Hamer uses it to enrich a child-character’s voice. Carmel has been abducted and is experiencing a kind of dislocation as she plays with two other children. The multiple conjunctions serve to emphasize the overwhelming giddiness. There’s almost no time to take a breath:
Beware the comma splice
Asyndeton should not be confused with the comma splice.
A comma splice describes two independent clauses joined by a comma rather than a conjunction or an alternative punctuation mark. I recommend you avoid it because some readers will think it's an error and might leave negative reviews. The standard-punctuation column in the table below shows how the authors have got it just right. The right-hand column shows you how the non-standard comma-spliced versions would appear.
Author: Ludlum, p. 355
Author: Rimington, p. 238
Author: Chandler, p. 119
Made-up example
Summing up
I hope this overview of syndeton, asyndeton, polysyndeton and the comma splice will help you to discover new ways of playing with the rhythm of your own writing while keeping the punctuation pedants at bay!
Resources and works cited
About Louise Harnby
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
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