Should I center align and italicize in-story writing? In a chapter of the story I'm writing, a character delivers a letter to someone, and she reads it out loud so everyone in the room can know what the letter is about. Should I center align the message and use italics to seperate it from the normal text, or leave it as is? Also, would this apply to things like journals, newspapers, etc.?
Her reading aloud is in a new paragraph. If you are reproducing the whole letter exactly as she is reading it, you indent a bit more than your normal paragraphs, and have a corresponding wider margin on the right side. The letter appears as a block of text in this way. Don't centre align or use italics. This applies to quoting any text which is longer than a few sentences, so the same goes for newspapers etc. Google 'using block indents for quotations'.
neither one... if it's too long for indenting it as ordinary dialog, you can tyoe it as a block indent, per above advice... but if she's reading it, that makes it dialog, so it has to go in " " in either case...
