I've been reading up a bit and it apparently depends a lot on house style, but also possibly on whether the dialogue itself is actually interrupted vs. whether it's just the presentation of the dialogue that's interrupted. Like, in the example, if the character actually stopped talking and focused on her cigarette-smushing, there'd be an argument for inside the quotation marks, while if the action doesn't actually interrupt the character's speech but is just placed there for author-reasons, there'd be an argument for outside the quotation marks. ETA: Cross-posted with the dancing doctor.
@BayView I've never heard of a US house style that would consider Francis' sentence, as he wrote it, to be a non-preference. It's not impossible, I suppose. But the manner of which the dashes can be used (just as you explained it), makes logical sense.
I overuse sentence interrupts. For me, they show how people care so much more about what they have to say than what they hear. Kind of like how I'm posting this and ignoring two pages of conversation.
It's interesting this idea of regional difference, basically, it means that if you seek an international audience, you're going to get stuff wrong!
I've always understood that you decide what country you're aiming at, and comply with that style. If you abruptly decide that you're never going to, for example, succeed with UK agent, and you decide to start pitching to US agents, you've got an editing job to do.
Those examples make perfect sense. In your first two examples, the speakers pause what they are saying, so the pause is part of the quotation and goes inside the quote marks. In the third, the pause is not made by the speaker, but by the narrator's thought insertion—so it's NOT part of the quotation but is outside it. I don't imagine the general rules about punctuation and quote marks are different on either side of The Pond either. The speaker stops at the end of a sentence (.), or asks a question (?), or exclaims (!). These marks of punctuation are just a visual transcription of what the speaker has said—just like the apostrophe in don't or can't, or a comma to indicate a pause within the speaker's sentence—and should all be inside the quote marks.
The writer of that blog may be correct with these, but his examples are terrible. The second reads very clumsily (when one is interrupted by another during a conversation, they don't usually complete the sentence they'd started, at least not as fluently as this). And the last example is just plain confusing.
So before submitting, I have to do a search/replace and change them all back to '--'? Is this just one or two publishers/agents or all of them? I don't remember seeing anything about this in submission guidelines in the last ten years or so.
Hmmm... I'm either in an 'oops' situation here or... Well, perhaps @Tenderiser could jump in and comment on this. She's a U.K. resident and has a U.S. agent. So, @Tenderiser, did you use U.S. or U.K. English in the novels you sent off to your U.S. agent? I just write in Canadian English (yeah, it's different than both U.S. and U.K.) so am I facing 'translating' it into U.S. English?
You're some lucky. We Windows folk don't get no Option key. Looks like we'll all die much sooner from carpal tunnel, eh?
The Option key on a Mac is the same as the Alt key on a PC. I guess Microsoft just has assigned different functions to it.
It's more about your market of expected publication rather than your agent's location. I write for the US market so I write in US English (even though I'm Canadian). If I were to write something for the Canadian market, I'd write in Canadian English, even though my agent is American.
Dang. Guess I'll be scouring through for U.S./Canadian differences after this draft is finished. (sigh)
Or leave it Canadian if you aren't sure you'll catch everything - probably more important to be consistent than to be American. (Stupid big market... why they got to be so BIG?)
I write in UK English as my books are set in the UK. I would be WTF reading a book where a Londoner was in London talking to other Londoners about sidewalks and parking lots, so I'm WTF about it as a writer. My agent agreed. The only thing I had to change was a reference to a jacket potato (baked potato) because apparently nobody outside of the UK has heard of that. ETA: Actually it's not just the setting. If I wrote a book set in the UK but the POV character was a USian on holiday (vacation), I would have her thinking about sidewalks and parking lots even if she adjusted her language for the locals which USians never do because MURICA FUCK YEAH. I use a lot of em-dashes and she didn't change them to -- before submission, either.
Okay, thanks for that. Maybe I'd better go that way. I do prefer to write in our native 'tongue' because U.S. English just looks... I don't know... foreign to me. Plus it kind of rankles me that some corporations—and even open source projects—don't even acknowledge the existence of Canadian English as a variation. I've yet to find a word processor other than MS Word that has a proper Canadian English dictionary. I suppose whichever agent I end up with (fingers crossed) will let me know if it needs to be changed.
Oh, yeah, I agree that the actual word choice should match the setting/characters. I was thinking more about the SPAG.
