: Re: When quoting, must I also copy hyphens used to divide words that continue on the next line? I want to quote a text in which re of the word relationships is on one line while lationships

According to The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.), 2.96:

End-of-line hyphens should be marked to distinguish between soft (i.e., conditional or optional) and hard hyphens. Soft hyphens are those hyphens that are invoked only to break a word at the end of a line; hard hyphens are permanent (such as those in cul-de-sac) and must remain no matter where the hyphenated word or term appears.

Although this doesn't explicitly address the question, I think it's as specific as the manual gets.

In point of fact, when any author writes their text, they often do not insert soft hyphens. It's only once the manuscript is typeset that, according to the publishing style, soft hyphens are used in order to close up spacing and avoid the appearance of white space. If there were grounds for authors calling foul, any author whose book has been published with the use of soft hyphens would be able to object to the misrepresentation. But this never happens.

Some stylistic devices do need to be part of a quoteâ€”or their absence mentioned. These include such things as italics, bolded text, superscripts and subscripts. But those are explicit devices used by the author to distinguish one part of text from another. When quoting their text, those same devices should be employed in the quotation so that the distinguishing features are preserved.

However, other stylistic devices that we read in books have most likely not been chosen by the author, and they are not required to convey the meaning of what they have written. These include such things as the overall font face, font size, font colour, the margins and line spacing usedâ€”and soft hyphens.

In fact, if you think about it, if you were to copy text that included a soft hyphen, and then pasted it so that the text all appeared on a single line, the hyphen that you previously saw breaking a word between lines of text would disappear. Otherwise, what you are doing is copying what should be a soft hyphen and pasting it as a hard hyphen. So, while you don't need to copy soft hyphens, you certainly shouldn't be copying them as hard hyphens.

Load Full (0)

: How do I mix linear and non-linear "choices" in an interactive novel? In my interactive novel, I'm trying to keep the word count between choice prompts fairly short and consistent, but that

@Annie587

Load Full 1 Comments

: Naming Characters after Friends/Family I drafted a book two years ago that I'm now polishing to publish. When I drafted it, for speed's sake, I named one of my primary characters after an old

@Annie587

Load Full 6 Comments

: I'll skip repeating what others have said. Some additional thoughts: As other have pointed out, "tiphoof" is probably not an anatomically accurate term for how a hoofed creature would ever walk,

@Annie587

Load Full 0 Comments

: I keep going back to the story in Breaking Bad. The purpose of the story, novel or TV series, is to establish characters in an environment and then show how they react or accommodate to

: Re: When quoting, must I also copy hyphens used to divide words that continue on the next line? I want to quote a text in which re of the word relationships is on one line while lationships

More posts by @Annie587

: How do I mix linear and non-linear "choices" in an interactive novel? In my interactive novel, I'm trying to keep the word count between choice prompts fairly short and consistent, but that

: Naming Characters after Friends/Family I drafted a book two years ago that I'm now polishing to publish. When I drafted it, for speed's sake, I named one of my primary characters after an old

: I'll skip repeating what others have said. Some additional thoughts: As other have pointed out, "tiphoof" is probably not an anatomically accurate term for how a hoofed creature would ever walk,

: I keep going back to the story in Breaking Bad. The purpose of the story, novel or TV series, is to establish characters in an environment and then show how they react or accommodate to

Login to post a comment!

0 Comments

Back to top