บท 274: The Pinecone Directive

ความคิดของผู้สร้าง

_michael

Merry New Year everyone. Now, straight to business.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that the formatting style I use in my writing involves presenting speech and thoughts as standalone lines. Dialogue is always shown as standalone lines, separated from any descriptive or action phrases. Everything within quotation marks is placed on its own line and is not interwoven with other text.

For example:

David, pressing his hand to his forehead, sighed and spoke.

“Great, another one bites the dust. Was this necessary?”

Thomas responded without glancing in David’s direction.

“Of course. It was necessary.”

……….

I’m currently facing a dilemma: should I continue with this standalone style or switch to the more popular approach that interweaves speech with descriptive or action tags?

In the interwoven style, dialogue is paired with descriptive phrases in the same paragraph or sentence.

For example:

“Great, another one bites the dust,” David said, pressing his hand to his forehead. He glanced at Thomas and asked, “Was this necessary?”

“Of course,” Thomas responded without glancing in David’s direction. “It was necessary.”

………

There’s also a third option: combining the two styles by using descriptive phrases when necessary and leaving the rest as standalone lines.

………

This dilemma stems from a comment I recently remembered, where someone mentioned that the standalone style made it hard for them to tell who was speaking.

Please tell me your thoughts.