Hi everyone, I've learned about formatting my speech correctly and how to indent, but part of my story involves a news report. The reporter reveals what happened to a gang after the main protagonist fled from the scene and contacted the police: "In other news the mysterious purple light which had dropped three youths into a Macclesfield police station two days ago has been spotted again, this time bringing in three members of Manchester's notorious Moss Side gang, a dangerous dog and a note which informed the police on the location of their base of operations. Nobody knows who sent the note, but CCTV footage shows it emerging from a purple vortex. The message led police to an old brewery on Moss Lane, where they found a cache of weapons and nine armed gang members claiming to be from the Moss Side Gang. Police have yet to comment on what the gang was doing so far from their home ground. Some of the suspects had suffered bullet wounds, prompting a search for a rival gang, but no activity has been reported in the area. But the strangest discovery was a set of artificial body parts, put together to resemble a human figure," stated the voice of a news reader over live footage from outside the former bottling plant. Should I end the first paragraph with a double-inverted comma and start the second paragraph in a similar manner, even though it is the same person talking all the way through? Lumping the whole lot into one paragraph makes it look a bit daunting to read.
Well, in "old school" grammar rules, you don't use the closing quotes until the end of the quote - regardless how many paragraphs that may include. The proper format would be to begin each paragraph with opening quotation marks but only the final paragraph of the quote would have the close quotes. Now, having said all of that, it would not come as a surprise to have people assert that there should, in fact, be closing quotes at the end of each paragraph. Most any style book you find, however, would hold to this format, however.
Thank you for clearing that up, everyone. Now all I have to do is figure out how the story will end, but that's something best saved for another topic.
