Do I still omit the closing quotation mark before a paragraph break in speech?

Question

Traditionally, paragraphs in speech are rendered like this:

The professor harumphed. "It's not as easy as that.

"English grammar is surprisingly complicated. Why, only yesterday..."

That is, only having a closing quotation mark at the end of the block and omitting the ones in paragraphs inside the spoken text.

Is this still a thing these days? Text rendering does change over time --- why, I remember the days when you pluralised numbers with apostrophes ('Personally, I quite like 4's and 5's.') and was quite glad when that went away.

It does look kind of weird, and as a whole I tend to rearrange my prose not to need it (e.g. adding a 'he said' to the first paragraph), but I dislike changing my writing style just because of a text rendering issue. If it's not a thing, what's the current approach?

(Note to mods: I've tagged this with 'grammar' because I can't think of anything more appropriate --- feel free to retag.)

It's still the practice; but hey, you're a grownup and can make your own rules. Now if somebody wants to pay you to do it their way, and wants to pay a starving graduate student to proofread it, that's another story. — StoneyB on hiatus, Apr 12 '15 at 23:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 13 '15 at 00:33

1

Yes, fiction authors are still using it.

answered Apr 13 '15 at 00:33

Marius Hancu

7,714

1

This is a terribly spartan answer. Furthermore, it gives too small a piece of the truth: this practice is by no means whatsoever limited to works of fiction. It is standard written English. Documenting that with proper references would make this comment an actual answer. – tchrist Apr 13 '15 at 02:15

Do I still omit the closing quotation mark before a paragraph break in speech?

1 Answers1