How to show a brief hesitation around a word
When we speak, there are often small pauses between syntactic units such as sentences. In writing, these pauses are signified by punctuation:
I can come if you want. (without pause)
I can come, if you want. (with brief pause)
I can come. If you want. (with longer pause)
But sometimes we briefly hesitate in the middle of syntactic units, for example, when we hesitate to utter a word that the listener might find objectionable:
This man, this (pause) monster, has done something despicable.
We can italicize such a word, as I have done, to show an emphasis. But that emphasis does not necessarily imply a pause:
This man, this monster, has done something despicable. (emphasis, but no pause)
This man, this...monster...has done something despicable. (pause, but no emphasis)
But the last example shows why using an ellipsis to signify a pause may be confusing. A reader, who does not know what I want to say, may wonder whether I have left out words before and after "monster", or if I mean that the speaker is trailing off twice, creating two longish pauses. The last example may look to a reader more like two broken off sentences instead of one sentence with two pauses:
This man, this... What a monster... He has done something despicable.
A full stop has been better used to create unmistakeable pauses in unconventional places:
I am going to tell you one last time: Go. Home. Now.
But a full stop is too strong a disruption in some cases. Usually, because we lack a specific symbol for a brief hesitation, we describe it:
This man, this -- I briefly hesitate -- this monster, has done something despicable.
But again, this inserted description is not exactly the same as a brief hesitation.
So how can I show a brief hesitation, for example surrounding the word "boy" in the following example?
I was expecting the president to be a middle aged man and then this (hesitation) boy (hesitation) comes in.
I have thought about this problem in my answer to a related question, but that question itself is broader than my current problem and can be easily solved through description.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/26468. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
Delays like that are often used in conveying dialog or poetry. I've seen periods used before.
I. Am. The king of texting.
This man, this. What a monster. He has done something despicable.
Italics is used to denote saying the word differently.
"You kissed her?"
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26481. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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My answer is a variation on my answer to the question you linked to: In prose, you cannot act out dialogue. Prose is recieved by the reader asynchronously. Things that take minutes can sometimes be read in seconds. Things that occur instantly or at the same time may take minutes to describe. Dialogue is not heard as it is spoken, with pauses and changes of pace and emphasis. It is read as prose, which it is.
It is only in very recent works that you find authors frequently trying to act out dialogue through punctuation or elaborate dialogue tags. I suspect it is movie influence. They are imagining who will play their characters in the movie version that will make them rich and they are trying to reproduce in print the way they imagine that actor delivering that line.
But this is not how authors have classically written dialogue. Instead, they have used entirely different devices to change the tone and emphasis of a speech to achieve the effect they want. They have added adjectives to add emphasis or changed word order to make the stress fall where they want it. They have use metaphor and symbol to evoke emotional responses. They have used alliteration and dissonance to emphasis particular ideas or passages.
It is well established that fictional dialogue is not real speech, and that real speech would be as difficult to read as fictional dialogue would be to speak in casual conversation. Movie dialogue is different as well (see Harrison Ford's well known complaints the George Lucas' dialog was impossible to deliver). Real speech on screen would be even more tedious than it is in real life. But movie dialog is not novel dialogue either, because it needs to leave space for the actor to act.
So, my answer is that you don't show hesitation. That you should not use hesitation as a device in dialogue at all -- or only very sparingly if you must -- but that you should recast you dialogue so that the emphasis you wish to create with the pause is created by some other means.
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1) Use the ellispses and emphasis, and tighten up the spaces.
This man, this...monster...has done something despicable.
There's no typesetting reason to have spaces on both sides of those ellipses, particularly since you aren't removing words. Plus you're writing fiction, and the use of ellipses for removed text is only in non-fiction quotes.
2) Add a little narration. Combine with other punctuation to convey the aural effect you want.
If the speaker is trailing off:
"This man, this..." His face twisted in disgust. "this monster has done something despicable."
If the speaker stops sharply:
"This man, this —" He shivered in atavistic fear. " — monster has done something despicable."
The few words of narration cause the reader's internal ear to stop playing dialogue and briefly play narration, which causes a break, if that makes sense. Also, the narration places another small action between the halves of the sentence, and that action happens in the pause you're trying to create.
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