RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

**Unnamed Mercenary** · **09-21-2015, 02:08 PM**

Show Content

long quote

(09-21-2015, 02:02 PM)Alothia Wrote:
(09-21-2015, 12:34 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote:
(09-21-2015, 11:39 AM)Aya Wrote: My choice of /say and /em comes down to two factors: do I want the *Character Name* first in the resulting sentence, or is there any particular clutter reason to use one or the other.Â Otherwise I treat them identically when IN CHARACTER and will freely use prose in /say.Â Because of that, the quotation marks really are a necessity ^^

What a fun morning of "RP-Style" posts!Â It actually is an intriguing topic!

Unnamed Mercenary Wrote:I do break a "rule" of English grammar in all of this though. Putting the punctuation inside the quotes. Hate it. Perhaps that's the computer science influence, but it just seems so silly to do it within RP because I'm effectively just using the quote marks to denote spoken text. They're self-contained.
The punctuation helps describe the tone and hence the sound of the dialogue, therefore it belongs within.Â The sentence containing the quotation may be a simple declarative: He asked a question.

Adding in the actual question does not change the tone of the original sentence, but the question itself should be indicated to mark its intent and spoken tone: He asked, "How was your weekend?" is a statement about what "he" asked.Â Whereas: He asked, "How was your weekend"? is a question about what "he" asked.

With regards to full stops, this is also another Europe vs US matter I think too isn't in? ^^

(I keep having to fix this, someone remind me not to discuss grammar before I have had my coffee please!)

I don't think I'd quite explained what I meant, but your post was a perfect reminder of that.

In my original post, I really only mean for the completion or continuation of dialogue. I'll try to provide better examples. When punctuation that would include a tone is used, I would DEFINITELY include it, despite having been taught that it's a big no-no.

What I prefer:
Franz said, "This is a thing".
Franz said, "This is a thing", as he did some other action.
Franz looked confused. "Is this really a thing?" he wondered out loud.

What I've been taught is correct:
Franz said, "This is a thing."
Franz said, "This is a thing," as he did some other action.
Franz looked confused. "Is this really a thing," he wondered out loud.

I've tried to bold the areas I'm talking about, but bolded punctuation's still tiny. It might be easier to say I prefer to encapsulate all aspects of the dialogue inside of the quotes, regardless of whether the punctuation is correct.

As someone who teaches writing dialogue as a part of my creative writing classes, the latter is the correct form, in that punctuation should be inside of the quotation marks. Â At least that's how we do it here in good 'ol VA.

Oh, I definitely know it is. ...which is why I'll continue doing the latter in everyday typing. It's always just thrown me up a bit when trying to handle multiple sentences worth of dialogue within a single "emoted" sentence.

So as an example:

/em briefly skimmed the menu, "well do I want the pork of the beef? Or maybe I'd rather get a soup and salad instead. What if I actually just want a sandwhich?" as he continued to go through all the options.

I know I'm supposed to use " [..] 'just a sandwich,' [...] ," but it's always felt odd after years of "programming text 1", "programming text 2", "programming text 3". Especially when the meaning carries over just the same.

Poll: Do you use " " around your spoken text in /say? You do not have permission to vote in this poll.
Yes	66.90%	97	66.90%
No	16.55%	24	16.55%
A mix of both	15.86%	23	15.86%
Other	0.69%	1	0.69%
Total		145 vote(s)	100%

Quotation marks in /Say

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes