Messenger/Chat dialogue

[Darkniciad]

Something I'm working on right now is going to contain quite a bit of dialogue that is taking place via email, messengers, chat, etc. Electronic dialogue.

The emails are easy enough to set off. I'm blockquoting them in italics. ( unfortunately, that's going to run into the Lit bug where the font changes after the blockquote, but oh well... I'm hoping they fix that at some point in the future )

So what I'm looking for is thoughts on how to set off the messenger/chat dialogue. Odds are that the style manuals will call for italics, and that's where I have a problem. If the style manuals have a better solution than that, feel free to point it out. I'm just concerned about presenting it here in a way that makes it easy to read on Lit.

By the time you use italics for emphasis and thought dialogue, putting electronic dialogue into the mix gets a little overbearing.

Elsewhere, I'm solving my problem simply enough by changing the font color to a dark blue, which doesn't clash with the normal text, but does stand out just enough to identify.

That's not possible on Lit, of course. Something Evil Alpaca did to set off an alien language in one of his stories gave me an idea.

Naturally, this would have an author's note to announce its use. I'm just going to type up something here for examples. This isn't part of the story.

===========

I can't believe I'm doing this. She looked over at Jamie with a little fear dancing in her eyes.

"Go for it, Tina. You'll love it."

"This is so crazy."

"And so hot," Jamie countered with a laugh.

Here goes nothing. Tina clicked the button to start her cam, and the chat started within seconds.

«U got gr8 tits!!»

«Hi Tina HRU?»

Still a little nervous, Tina took a deep breath and started typing. «Hi guys I'm gr8»

===============

Thoughts? Depending upon how it looks in preview, I might still put the electronic dialogue in italics as well as using the angle quotes.

 

[Weird Harold]

I mostly see chat transcripts in this format:

Caller one: U got gr8 tits!!

Caller two: Hi Tina HRU?

Still a little nervous, Tina took a deep breath and started typing.

Gr8Tits: Hi guys I'm gr8

You wouldn't necessarily need to use Bold for the ChatIDs, I just used Bold to emphasize the tags.


The double angle brackets work without resorting to Italics, but I see that alternate quotation mark technique used more for telepathy or mind-control than for electronic communications.

 

[Darkniciad]

I mostly see chat transcripts in this format:



You wouldn't necessarily need to use Bold for the ChatIDs, I just used Bold to emphasize the tags.


The double angle brackets work without resorting to Italics, but I see that alternate quotation mark technique used more for telepathy or mind-control than for electronic communications.

I feel like that interrupts the flow of the story, though. I've always thought it felt extremely bumpy when I read something written like that ( when it wasn't entirely a chat transcript )

I'm mulling over some changes to telepathy as well, because the main character in my Fantasy story has mental powers, and those telepathic communications happen with a fair amount of regularity. Having the same sort of "confusing italics" feelings about that.

I'm leaning toward single quotes + italics there. It gives it just a touch of definition, while still holding on to the mental nature of internal thought dialogue.