Correct Form for a Letter/Email/SMS

[SevenSquared]

When you are writting a story and you want to include a letter/email/SMS from a character in the story, what is the correct way to do it? For SMS and short emails I tried just using speech marks as if the character was talking (obviously making it clear it wasn't speech) but it didn't seem right. Then I tried no speech marks but with the whole thing in italics, but that didn't look quite right either.

Does anybody have a foolproof guide for this or a link to a story where it is done well?

 

[Boxlicker101]

When you are writting a story and you want to include a letter/email/SMS from a character in the story, what is the correct way to do it? For SMS and short emails I tried just using speech marks as if the character was talking (obviously making it clear it wasn't speech) but it didn't seem right. Then I tried no speech marks but with the whole thing in italics, but that didn't look quite right either.

Does anybody have a foolproof guide for this or a link to a story where it is done well?

I'm unsure what you mean by "speech marks." Are those what I would call "Quotation Marks?" If I were to directly quote a letter, those are what I would do, but I don't remember ever doing that, except for brief emails or entries in a diary. These would usually be in the L & T category, and I don't have many of them.

If I ever had somebody reading a letter he or she had just received in the mail, I would probably not quote it directly, but just describe what was said. The way the character reading the letter interprets it is more important than the actual words anyhow. If a character were to read a letter out loud, it would be like any other dialogue and would be surrounded by quotation marks.

Remember to use the punctuation properly when a quotation includes more than one paragraph.

 

[SevenSquared]

Yes, Speech Marks = Quotation Marks.

I definitely agree that if it was a long letter I would simply summarise the content and the tone rather than quote it directly. Likewise, if it was just a few words (a brief SMS for example), it might look okay in quotation marks. It's the ones in between that seem to be giving me problems. In the story I am currently writing, the narrator receives a couple of 2-3 line emails where the wording and tone are somewhat important. They seem too long to use quotation marks, but too short to really be able to summarise.

 

[D_Lynn]

When you are writting a story and you want to include a letter/email/SMS from a character in the story, what is the correct way to do it? For SMS and short emails I tried just using speech marks as if the character was talking (obviously making it clear it wasn't speech) but it didn't seem right. Then I tried no speech marks but with the whole thing in italics, but that didn't look quite right either.

Does anybody have a foolproof guide for this or a link to a story where it is done well?

I don't know the proper guidelines for this, but I can share what I've done.

For actual text, as in a letter or email, I indent the entire article, and use either italics or bold lettering to denote that it is quoted text. Example:

Dear Sophie,

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.

Sincerely,
Rolph​

For SMS/text messages, I usually do something like this:

> Are you kidding me?
>> LOL. No.

That pretty clearly shows the interaction between parties, in my opinion.

Again, not sure this is standard practice or anything. Unfortunately, the guides for writing were designed for printed text and don't always work well for electronic works.

Hope that helps.

 

[PennLady]

As D-Lynn says, I don't think there's a definitive guide on this (yet). I can also share what I've done, which is mostly use italics.

In Who Cares What I Wear? the main character composes letters in her head. I set them off in italics, and before the first one, I specifically say that she was "composing a letter in her head to Ben as she often did." Then the letter follows.

For text messages, which I haven't done much of and haven't done an exchange with, I also use italics. I did this first in Unexpected Gifts; scroll down past the first scene break, or search for "met someone."

If I was writing a chat conversation, I can think of a couple of ways to do it. You could sort of recreate the appearance like this:

Username1: statement
Username 2: response

Or you could alternate, with one participant's words in italics and the other in quotes. Or D_Lynn's idea of > and >> to differentiate between the people conversing is good. Anything that identifies your characters and differentiates them without being too intrusive is probably good.

You could also check the Chicago Style Manual (or other such guide), but I don't know if that's covered in there.

 

[estragon]

For texting, Sir_Nathan did it well in "Culture Shock". However, I don't know that there's an "accepted" method. I'd do as SA Penn Lady suggests, until someone can point to an authoritative source.

 

[SevenSquared]

There are some pretty good ideas there, thanks. DLynn, I am particularly intrigued by your indenting example, I think that looks good. Is there a specific html tag for that or do you just use a bunch of spaces or something?

 

[PennLady]

There are some pretty good ideas there, thanks. DLynn, I am particularly intrigued by your indenting example, I think that looks good. Is there a specific html tag for that or do you just use a bunch of spaces or something?

You can probably use spaces, but Lit will also accept the <blockquote> HTML tag. Which closes, of course with the </blockquote> tag. I've used this as well. I forget why I didn't indent the letters in "Who Cares." All I can think is that I probably didn't like the way it looked.