{"id":86,"date":"2008-06-10T04:47:13","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T04:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=86"},"modified":"2021-07-07T10:25:37","modified_gmt":"2021-07-07T15:25:37","slug":"internal-dialogue-italics-or-quotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/quotation-marks\/internal-dialogue-italics-or-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Internal Dialogue: Italics or Quotes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>NOTE:\u00a0<\/strong>Please see our article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/effective-writing\/diving-back-into-dialogue-part-ii\/\">Diving Back Into Dialogue: Part II<\/a>, for an expanded discussion of this topic.<\/p>\n<p>Internal dialogue is used by authors to indicate what a character is thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Direct internal dialogue refers to a character thinking the exact thoughts as written, often in the <strong>first person<\/strong>. (The first person singular is <em>I<\/em>, the first person plural is <em>we<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Example:<\/strong> &#8220;I lied,&#8221; Charles thought, &#8220;but maybe she will forgive me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Notice that quotation marks and other punctuation are used as if the character had spoken aloud.<\/p>\n<p>You may also use italics without quotation marks for direct internal dialogue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Example:<\/strong> <em>I lied<\/em>, Charles thought, <em>but maybe she will forgive me<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Indirect internal dialogue refers to a character expressing a thought in the third person (the third person singular is <em>he<\/em> or <em>she<\/em>, the plural is <em>they<\/em>) and is not set off with either italics or quotation marks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Example:<\/strong> Bev wondered why Charles would think that she would forgive him so easily.<\/p>\n<p>The sense of the sentence tells us that she did not think these exact words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOTE:\u00a0Please see our article Diving Back Into Dialogue: Part II, for an expanded discussion of this topic. Internal dialogue is used by authors to indicate what a character is thinking. Direct internal dialogue refers to a character thinking the exact thoughts as written, often in the first person. (The first person singular is I, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotation-marks"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5107,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/5107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}