: Re: Using dashes in writing dialogue Does anyone use em dashes (or two hyphens) to denote speakers in dialogue passages? Joyce does this as does William Gaddis. Many others. I practice it, but my

@Martha805

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Check out the English examples here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_marks#Quotation_dash
In, for example, "Dubliners" Joyce puts the speaker tag at the end a lot. He appears to just be doing away with conventions of a lot of punctuation that isn`t necessary. In something like "Trainspotting," it appears to be more of a dialectical thing, where he doesn't use many speaker tags at all. Other writers use both to distinguish 2 types of speech.

I think that there aren't really any set rules, as most writers who uses dashes use them for the fact that it is different or does something that puntuation marks don't. But you might run into trouble with editors.

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