To begin, this is my first post on these forums. I'd like to thank all of you first and foremost for your time. I've recently finished my second manuscript and I will soon be sending it out for a hopeful publication. However, before I print it, there is a grammatical part of it I wish to ask all of you about. The sentence is written on a sheet of paper by a professor, looking like this: "Billy quickly moved the big box of papers." Now the sentence itself isn't my concern (its meant to be simple). What I'm concerned about is how its meant to be written when my main character re-iterates the words in the story...i.e. the text looks something like this: "'Moved' is the verb, 'Billy' is the subject, 'quickly' is the adverb and 'of papers' is a prepositional phrase, acting like an adjective by modifying the box." The main character speaks this aloud yet, did I write it properly? Should there be the ' ' (I don't know what their called), around the re-iterated word? I italicized them as well. Do you think this is acceptable? Hope my question is clear, I apologize for any confusion. Thank you for your time and responses.
there should be no italics... there's no need for them, since you have the quoted words in ' ' [called 'single quotation marks'] within the dialog, that is enclosed within regular quotation marks [in american usage, anyway... in british usage, it's reversed]...
Alright, sounds good. Out of curiosity though, even though the proper literary form would be without italics, would it still be alright to keep them? I mean...do you think it would look better without them in your opinion? Also, just so I dont add to the plethora of threads, I was reading up on proper manuscript format and it mentioned 1.5 inch margins, all around. Is that really the case? Only reason why I asked is because I just did it and...well...its really scrunched up. I just wanted to see what all of you thought about that.
definitely not! 1" all around is acceptable to most agents/publishers and what i usually use, to save paper... but you should always check each one's submission guidelines, to be sure you do it their way, in case they say some other setting is a must...
