Editor's Workshop: Punctuation and dialogue

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What follows now are my opinions, not an official style guide. I welcome discussion.

The CWA Standard Approach

My own approach is almost always:

"This is a summary," says person who is described as this, "and this is an explanation in more detail."

or

"This is a statement!" says person doing thing. "This is something else I have to say."

Clean, simple approaches, right?

The key here is that the first bit of speech should establish the position, then what follows is the detail. I like this approach, its a good default to fall back on. What works less well is when the opening bit of speech is bland or non-informative.

I don't like this approach:

"I have an opinion too," says speaker, "and this is my opinion."
"If I can interrupt," says speaker, "this is my opinion."

The problem here is that the lazy reader is deep into sentence before any information has been transmitted. I don't see much narrative benefit from this and tend to edit it out.

Establishing the speaker, then speaking

Another approach that I think looks okay is this.

This person is described acting in some establishing way, and then he says: "This is my opinion."

For me its all about narrative. I don't use this approach by default, but if the speaker's identity is more important than what he is saying, then I use this approach.

Whole scene in an option

Then there's what I call the messy interrupted speech approach. I don't like this generally.

"I am saying this," says the person, who looks like this, "and I'm saying this." He then does this. "I'm saying this too, but..." He pauses to do something else. "I'm saying this thing now."

This seems to be increasingly popular in issue writing at the moment. I generally dislike it in 95% of circumstances, though other editors seem to have more tolerance for it. For me, its readability is poor, demanding too much attention on the part of the reader to where speech marks start and end, which is pretty hard when we are using straight quotes, and when we aren't allowed line breaks within an option.

Is there a role for it?

Yes, but ONLY if the narrative definitely requires it. That is, if there is any way at all to transmit the same information and tell the same story without using this approach, then this approach should be avoided.

In my mind, an acceptable use might look something like this:

"It hurts, my stomach, it hurts so much." Her anguish is visible in her jaundice-stained eyes, which can barely meet yours. "I mean, I know it's my own fault," she continues, an emaciated hand indicating an empty whisky bottle by the bedside, "but can anyone deserve to be punished like this?"

The beats in the above example need the second action to interrupt speech a second time. To make it more readable I've avoided making it one huge run on sentence. To avoid confusion I've kept it to one extra interruption on the speech.

The reason why this approach is messy is that the reader's eye can't easily determine what is and isn't speech. In conventional writing, line breaks would help this out, but in NS you can't have a line break within an option.

So I'm not entirely averse to multiply interrupted speech, I just think it needs to be applied rarely and in moderation, and should not be used unless there is significant narrative benefit from doing so.

Anyway, here endeth the sermon.