I just read the award-winning short story by David Constantine, Tea at the Midland, which won last year's BBC National Short Story comp.

He doesn't use traditional speech marks for speech, and he doesn't seem to substitute them reliably with anything else either (he does some of the time, but not all). In places I found it really hard to tell which was speech and which was description.

I recently read Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, which I loved, and which also doesn't use speech marks. I knew most of the time who was speaking and whether it was speech or not, but there were a few occasions when I had to puzzle over it.

I was recommended to read Roddy Doyle a while back, and was put off because (I'm saying this from memory, but am fairly sure) he doesn't use traditional speech marks. Without checking, I think he uses a dash instead of speech marks, which is at least something.

WHY??? I really don't understand. I realise language evolves and so does punctuation, but why discontinue use of something perfectly serviceable and replace it with something no better or, even worse, by nothing at all, increasing ambiguity?

I know that in theory we should be able to tell whether A or B is speaking from the words they choose the the rhythms (in theory at least - and I have my issues with this anyway), but do they really think their work reads better if they rely on the readers' super perception of the wording chosen to determine when it's speech and when it's not? Or otherwise they have to puzzle over the piece to figure out which is speech and which isn't?

In Tea at the Midland he doesn't even use a different line, and neither did Julie Myerson IIRC.

Is this about trying to be clever, experimental, the Emperor's New Clothes?? Or is there a good reason?

Deb

I couldn't read Roddy Doyle because of the lack of speech marks - it's like an author waving at the reader saying Look at me, doing writing.
However, having just finished Meg Rosoff's wonderful How I Live Now, there is a place in wriitng technique when it's ok not to use speech marks. At all other times, though, it's just too faddy.

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In fairness to Doyle I should add that some publishers/countries use a dash in front of the dialogue, instead of speech marks.

Hmm... I suppose the reason depends on the story.

If it's a first person narrator it could be a way of signifying that this is all told in their voice - that even the speech is reported speech said by them. It reminds you that although the narrative purports to be reportage of what happened, in reality it's a single voice speaking to you. In other words to give deliberate ambiguity about what is and isn't speech.

It could be to give the impression of stream of consciousness (particularly so if there are no punctuation marks at all - Jose Saramago does this - it gives an effect a bit like a prose poem).

It could be to take away some of your reading crutches, precisely in order to force you to break stride and look more carefully at the words, to read more slowly.

It could be to force the writer to write more carefully, to think more about his/her choice of words and voice. A bit like those novels written within a given constraint, like oulipo literature, which is, I suppose, a way of training yourself, working muscles that don't normally get worked in regular prose.

It could be that the writer hasn't analysed it at all and that's just how it came out.

Or none of the above!

I'm not a big fan of it myself but I think when it's done extremely well, you don't notice it so much.

Yes, my first thought is that it's about making it all be one narrative voice, without trying to peddle the illusion that this is actually what someone said - (rather as some writers, writing memoir, don't feel that they can report as actually said something which they can only remember the gist of.)

Poets mostly don't use speech marks; sometimes they put what a person actually says in italics, but sometimes nothing at all. As Flora says, it's about the slower reading that requires being a good thing, not a bad one: that in reading slower the connotations and connections have time to flower in the mind, and so the reader makes the text their own, instead of just taking the writer's reporting at face value and moving on.

Other traditions manage without: the French use dashes, and as I remember the Spanish use opening ones, but, like the French, then go on to the speech tag or whatever follows the speech, without closing them.

Emma

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FWIW, I blogged about desirable difficulties in writing here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/01/desirable-difficulty.html

I first encountered this in the same Julie Myerson story, Deb. I came away with two possible explanations:

1. She didn't know how to use speech marks

2. She was trying to be literary, in some obscure way which escaped me

I didn't see the point, and for me it made the entire story very hard going. If writers who do this are trying to be clever, then it fails to work for me, and I will avoid other stories which leave speech marks out, in future. I read to be entertained, not to be required to do half of the writer's job.