Pet peeve--no quotation marks for dialogue! Am I being

[gratefultobelib]

lazy or picky or what? I do find it hard, though, to get into a book sometimes when I have to dig the dialogue out of the narrative. However, I seem to remember Cold Mountain was w/o quotation marks and I loved that book. Oh well... just wondering what some of the rest of you literary folk thought.

[Sal Minella]

1. Takes a really good writer to pull it off, I think. The voice of the dialog

has to leap out of the text, almost as though it's in a different color (visual thinker here, can you tell). With most writers it just looks pretentious, and I find it exceedingly annoying and always wonder why the writer was too lazy to put the quotation marks in.

So you may be picky and peevish, but you ain't alone.

[Orrex]

3. You said it exactly IMO

My first extended exposure to quote-less dialogue was McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and I admit that it took a while to get the hang of it. But McCarthy is so skilled in the technique that the characters' speech readily distinguishes itself from the surrounding text.

But if it's not used carefully, it can be a disaster.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Man, I HATE that! Agree! nt

[shimmergal]

4. I hate it too.

Even if the writer is skilled at using it, constant readers are TRAINED to subconsciously recognize dialogue from the quote marks. Leaving them out means extra work for the reader, that could be better spent on the deeper aspects of the story.

I tend to view it as an affectation that says the writer wants to be: 1) Literary and 2) different.