Don't kill you, kill the author. I hate, hate, hate books like that. Actually, I hate pretty much every romance novel written by an inhabitant of the USA and set in the UK. They make me cringe. And throw things.
Before I met him, my husband used eye dialogue in several places. When editing those same pages many years later, I scolded him for it and took most of it away. By that point it had been long enough since he'd written it that he actually agreed with me. The characterization isn't hurt by losing it, so why keep it? Though I did leave it for a character that stuttered when nervous, because it was important to the scene that the reader be able to tell that he was doing so.
Admittedly, it would be just as obnoxious if your writer commented on the "delicious Irish accent" or some such nonsense on every page. Or are all the characters Irish?
Ellipses, incidentally, are my great editorial failing. I overuse them and my husband overuses them, including using them alone as dialogue. Even if it isn't strictly correct, I think that still works for the medium we're working in. When you need to break up sentences across multiple speech bubbles so you don't crowd the page, the ellipses become stylistic and would require a major rewrite to
Ellipses aren't wrong. I use them all the freaking time in dialogue, along with em-dashes. I am the queen of interrupted or trailing-off speech!
BUT. There is a correct way to punctuate and capitalize around them, and this book is consistently doing it wrong.
The writer also doesn't understand the difference between ellipses and em-dashes, and why she should use one or the other. She appears to be afraid of the em-dash (perhaps intimidated by the "inside or outside the quotes?" dilemma), and has consequently used ellipses for everything.
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Admittedly, it would be just as obnoxious if your writer commented on the "delicious Irish accent" or some such nonsense on every page. Or are all the characters Irish?
Ellipses, incidentally, are my great editorial failing. I overuse them and my husband overuses them, including using them alone as dialogue. Even if it isn't strictly correct, I think that still works for the medium we're working in. When you need to break up sentences across multiple speech bubbles so you don't crowd the page, the ellipses become stylistic and would require a major rewrite to
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BUT. There is a correct way to punctuate and capitalize around them, and this book is consistently doing it wrong.
The writer also doesn't understand the difference between ellipses and em-dashes, and why she should use one or the other. She appears to be afraid of the em-dash (perhaps intimidated by the "inside or outside the quotes?" dilemma), and has consequently used ellipses for everything.
Reply
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