: Re: Acronym issue transitioning from prose to dialogue I am writing fiction. There is a group called the Mental Health Access and Referral Team. In prose, I can either use M-HART or MHART. In dialogue,

@Annie587

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By "prose" I take it you mean "narrative". But whatever.

RE writing single letters in italics: I agree, that just doesn't apply here. I presume you're referring to their discussion about referring to letters as letters, like a teacher saying, "Now, Billy, write the letter 'M' on the blackboard." This doesn't apply to acronyms.

In general, I'd write a word the same in dialog as in narrative, unless there's some issue about pronunciation. Why would you think it should be written differently? If you were writing dialog and while MHART is usually pronounced "em-heart", one person pronounces it "muh-art", and this is relevant and makes a differences, then yes, you need to call it out. (BTW, I don't know if this is a real organization, and if so how it is normally pronounced. I'm just giving an example.) Otherwise, I just wouldn't worry about it. Even if you are recording an actual conversation and one person did pronounce it differently from the others, but it didn't matter, I just wouldn't worry about it. We usually don't worry about an occasional mis-pronounced word, differences in regional accents, etc, when recording conversations, unless they matter for some reason. Like if they caused misunderstanding, or if we want to portray someone as stupid because he continually mispronounces words, etc.

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