Literotica's rules on quotation marks for internal dialogue / thoughts?

[seXenon]

Hi

Ok, I tried submitting a new story. I think the grammar rules I wrote with are the same as my previous stories, but this one got rejected because I didn't do quotation marks correctly.

SOOO, I think my main dialog is correct ... quotes around the thing that is said, commas inside the quote if the tag come after, end marks inside, etc....

The place where I think this story is different is that I have A LOT of internal dialogue in this story.

What is the Literotica requested rules for internal dialogue / thoughts? single quotes, double qoutes, same as spoken dialogue, italics (that seems to be getting much more common online recently), etc

thanks

Stephen

 

[EmilyMiller]

If you use single quotes for internal dialog, then follow the same rules as for double quotes and external dialog. But you don’t have to do that really.

So either of these is OK:

I wondered to myself how best to help this person out. It was a kinda tricky problem.

Or

‘How best to help this person out,’ I wondered to myself, ‘it was a kinda tricky problem.’

For a definitive treatise on dialog punctuation, try this essay by @FrancesScott (approved by Literotica co-owner @Laurel as well).

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-punctuate-dialogue

 

[FrancesScott]

If you use single quotes for internal dialog, then follow the same rules as for double quotes and external dialog. But you don’t have to do that really.

So either of these is OK:

I wondered to myself how best to help this person out. It was a kinda tricky problem.

Or

‘How best to help this person out,’ I wondered to myself, ‘it was a kinda tricky problem.’

For a definitive treatise on dialog punctuation, try this essay by @FrancesScott (approved by Literotica co-owner @Laurel as well).

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-punctuate-dialogue

Thank you for mentioning my essay.

 

[ronde]

I have had a few rejections for punctuation of dialogue and it's always been that I didn't "close" a quote. I think what this does is screw up the automatic formatting Literotica uses to publish a story, i.e. this:

She said, "I don't like that.

I replied, "I don't care."

Then she frowned.

gets interpreted as:

She said, "I don't like that. I replied, "

I don't care.

"Then she frowned. (The software keeps looking for a "close quote" after this. What it finds probably makes the story unreadable and the effect multiplies with each missing quote mark)

Another thing to watch for is to make sure you use "curly quote marks", sometimes called "69" quote marks. I have sometimes used Open Office as my word processor and the default appears to be two slashes for both opening and closing quotes. I'm not sure what Literotica does with those, but I know from experience that if you mix them, you'll get the same rejection about punctuating dialogue.

 

[BrandDickens]

For internal thoughts, I often just go for it without extra punctuation. For online chat or texting, I use italics. Here's how that might look.

"Seriously, my girlfriend wants me to suck you off," I told him. As I watched his reaction, I thought about how much I wanted to feel that big dick inside my eager mouth. I thought about sliding my tongue across the smooth skin of his cock head and shivered because of it. Was I truly ready to do this? Picking up my phone, I texted Amy, I think he's going to let me do it! I wasn't wrong.