I'm saying some other established convention is not an issue here. If a phone call with the receiver up to your ear that no one else in the room is depicted as other out loud dialogue, I see no reason the same thing using a different device closer to the ear canal should be any different. It's not about whether or not other people can hear the dialogue, it matters if it is spoken or thoughts. There was a consensus in both critique groups I'm going to that italics for inner monologue was the standard convention. And they are not novice writers. And I invested considerable time researching the matter with an open mind when the issue came up here because, despite @Cogito's false accusations re my motives, I wanted to get it right. I was not invested in proving my critique group right. In fact, you all might know me by now, I'm not afraid to go against the flow if I think that's what the evidence supports. I love all the advice you give around here @ChickenFreak, it's very good. But with this issue I feel you are being too rigid for reasons I'm not convinced are valid. So now we come to ESP internal dialogue. It's neither internal monologue nor spoken dialogue. I don't think one should declare it the same as someone speaking into an ear bug. However, I can also understand someone saying it is not exactly the same as inner monologue. What do we need to show the reader? It is not spoken aloud. It is not the character that can hear it's monologue. Except for declaring it the same as a voice on a phone, I have no objection to how you are suggesting it be depicted. Quotes may confuse the reader that it was said out loud, but then simple italics might confuse the reader as to whose voice it is. I think in this case it can be managed either way, with quotes (I've changed my position) as long as it's clear with tags that the voice is in someone's head, or with italics as long as it's clear with tags whose thoughts are whose. I do think using tags with neither quotes nor italics is unnecessarily confusing to the reader of all the options.
For telepathy, I'll agree that you need one or the other. (Quotes for me; either quotes or italics for you.) The thought is not the thought of the person who is receiving the thought, so the usual rules of internal monologue, whatever one says those rules are, don't apply.
I meant to add: The day may come--I'd give, oh, seventy percent odds of it coming in the next twenty years, forty percent in ten--when I reluctantly accept that italics for thoughts have become an accepted convention. I need to see it used in a much broader set of genres before I'm prepared to accept that. But the day is not going to come when I stop disliking it. I accept that, for example, first person present tense is a perfectly valid choice. But I have yet to finish reading a novel in first person present tense, because I hate it so very much.
I think first person present tense is a bit too much of a fad for me at the moment, but I don't mind reading it other than that. I think it's interesting you've yet to accept what all the evidence suggests is a changed and now accepted convention.
Not enough evidence for me, nope. Perhaps three books that I've read more than a chapter of use italics for thoughts. As a lifetime percentage of books I've read, that's well under one percent. Not enough. And it's not that I pick up books in the bookstore or library, see them use italics for thoughts, and put them down. I just don't see the italics for thoughts in any of the genres that I read.
Hmm. I'm too lazy to go through this whole thread afresh, but has it already been mentioned that the 14th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style offered italics as an option for thoughts, while the 15th edition dropped that option? I'm surprised that the older version allows italics, because I see the italics as newfangled. However the fact that the newer version dropped the option suggests that italics are not growing in acceptability.
I'm trying to understand why I hate it (for the record, not saying it can't ever work, but 99% of the time it doesn't). I think it's a cheap way to make the prose sound more important and edgy. Like everything is happening at that very moment, and the reader ought to be glued to their seat and hanging on every word.
Yep, that's part of it for me. And it also strains belief for me. We're used to stories--something happened, and then somebody had time to digest the events and describe them. But a bunch of neat clean literary phrases about what's supposedly happening Right This Very Minute doesn't fit any mental model of storytelling for me. I know that this doesn't make a lot of sense--by that logic, I should care whether the narrator of a first person past novel dies at the end, for example, because if he's dead how is he going to tell his story? And I don't care about that. But all the same, I just can't wrap my mind around believing in a beautiful description of present events.
I don't feel the same as you do about italics for thoughts @ChickenFreak, but I certainly feel the same about first person present. It just jangles me. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, and some folks probably love it for its realistic, edgy flavour, but it doesn't appeal to me most of the time. I can think of a few exceptions—including one writer on this forum whose style I admire a whole lot—but I think you've nailed the reason I'm not fond of it in general. It doesn't feel like storytelling. The old once upon a time, settle in and I'll tell you a story mode that I love so much. Instead it's often like listening to a shouted conversation somebody is having with their mobile phone. And then I says, and then he says, and then I go what! and it's not there, y'know... awesome... Eyes cross, fall off branch... I'm one of those who also doesn't mind if the narrator of a first person novel dies at the end ...as long as there is a mechanism in place for the story getting 'out there.' Another little quirk of mine! Papers locked in a chest to be unearthed after the funeral, whatever. Something to let me know it's not some italicised (or not) monologue some dead person is delivering in my ear.
My other major problem for 1st person present (this is the same as stream of consciousness, correct?) is its ease of abuse. 99 out of 100 times, those who write in first person present fall into the I did this. Then I did that. Then I did this. Trap. The sentences are extremely monotonous. Also, the POV camera is so wrapped up around the MC, I feel like they ought to be Charlie Sheen, and it's annoying when they're not. We should have really have a thread discussing how to use 1st person present correctly.
Looking for a source of the claim the CMoS changed their guide, this was my first find: The Editor's Blog supports the use of italics and some reasons to use them we've not clearly articulated in this thread. There is also the option of not using them and the mention that quotes are not used, it confuses the reader. But she includes this comment which is one reason I use the italics: This was interesting because it's from the opposite POV, italics is the standard but you can try to write without them : I'll keep looking for the CMoS change. I read nothing in my earlier quest suggesting that had occurred and I think I would have seen something.
There's a quote on this page--search for "14th": http://www.writers.net/forum/showthread.php?103888-Dialogue-and-thoughts. But I don't have access to the source to confirm it.
