An example from a recent story, using blockquote. Keyboard font doesn’t work on the forums hence the image:
I will say that I think the CMOS is less definitive than that, actually. It recommends the use of standard dialogue markers in nonfiction, but in fiction:
That's from their Shop Talk post from 2020. I haven't found more recent guidance, and the bulk of that post is some insane wishcasting about representing text messages with hybrid or multimodal formatting.
I've seen this too, but never gave it too much credence because it reads more like an author's personal blog. I really don't get what she means by using standard dialogue in nonfiction but not in fiction.
The only reason I give it more credence than a personal blog is that the CMOS links to this post in answers about the topic. And yeah, we're not talking about scripture here. It's not the WORD OF THE LORD or anything. So we're on the same page there.
which is something that's come up in the thread. Because the leading punctuation introduces an assumed action, changing the formatting to remove that assumption has benefits for clarity. Non-fiction (and the post specifically says "no-nonsense nonfiction" like academic articles or reports) tends to have limited dialogue, if any, and frequently uses quotation marks to indicate quotes from written texts, something that hardly ever happens in fiction. When written communication, like a letter, is quoted in fiction it's usually in my experience indicated with either italics and/or some sort of spatial formatting, like section breaks and spacing:
You're still formatting it as dialogue, just with a different indicator. Using the example in the blog post:
And then that might continue to look like:
Ohh ho ho, someone's fancy
also I'm jealous I never thought of this; I'll have to try it myself sometime 
Agreed, no wrong answers if the reader gets what's going on. Once you've established that italics mean text, though, you can start leading with them like they're quotes in dialogue without having ambiguity. That can be a useful tool, especially if you ever have to mix communication methods, like the scene in Sherlock or, less elaborately, if two people are having a meatspace conversation while one of them is texting simultaneously.
It's not that bad (though maybe it's different depending on what platform you write in). I use a macro in Word to handle basic formatting, like the underlining. So I start by writing out the conversation:
And I don't touch it until I've finished the story or the chapter. Once I'm finished with content, I wrap everything in tags. Usually at this point I'll put pieces with lots of formatting, like texts, into a draft Lit story so I can preview just that portion of the text. Then I cut out the Word spacing and put in the line break tags. Then it goes back in the preview for a final check.
This is the markup underlying the example I posted above. It’s not that scary.
I'm sure it's one of those things that looks scary at first but makes a lot more sense if you put a bit of basic effort into learning it. It does look nice, so probably worth it. Might well try it out one day
Thanks for the example. I think the kbd stuff does look pretty nice as well, will keep that in mind for the future
The <blockquote> or <p align…> is icing on the cake. Plain keyboard font is easy and you can manage convos easily enough with intervening text / reactions / my phone beeped and etc.
I do like the <blockquote> command, I used it in one of my stories to set off the writing on a plaque on a statue in one of my stories. I've been setting up the texts with it in several WIP's, just nothing published yet.
When it goes wrong, there's a risk it goes catastrophically wrong - like turn a whole Lit page to italics because you can't predict a page break and you didn't do a html closure at the end of a paragraph; or lose lines of dialogue completely, because you inadvertently created a command you didn't even know about.
<i>Good</i>, I thought. Checking that Gemma didn’t see, I replied to Bill:
<hr><p align=left>🔺<i> Come to my place today, not the evening. This is your only chance.</i></p><hr>
He replied quickly:
<hr><p align=right><i>I’m in a meeting with lawyers. Where are you?</i>🔻</p>
<p align=left>🔺<i> I sent you a Google Maps.</i></p>
<p align=right><i>I’ll be there at 11.</i>🔻</p>
<p align=left>🔺<i>Before you get here, tip me $5,000. I sent my bank details. I will check that it’s sent before you get here, otherwise I will cancel.</i></p><hr>
He did not reply to the last message. I guessed that he was disappointed that I was making our meeting a “business” meeting, rather than romantic. But it was my safety net to do that, to keep emotional distance. I assumed that my message had put him off me completely.
