Dash and space usage for dialogue interruptions, stuttering, starting over
I'm hoping for guidance on several very similar situations, which I suspect are all meant to be punctuated and spaced differently.
Stuttering
How would you write someone stuttering out the word "you"? Here is my best guess:
“What do y-y-you want?”
That is, hyphens (not en or em dashes), and no spaces. Is this correct?
Starting over a sentence
How would you write someone starting over a sentence, i.e. "interrupting themself"? Here is my best guess:
“That’s— It’s more complicated than that.”
That is, em dash, but add a space after the em dash, since it's kind of functioning like a period. Also, the new sentence is capitalized. Is this correct?
(I'm mostly doubting myself on the space.)
Repeating yourself
This gets tricky, because this is kind of like a stutter, but also kind of like the last example, so I'm confused:
“Who—who are the other candidates?”
Have to—have to make it worth it.
“Saying that isn’t legally binding,” she frowned, again, “and it—it’s not that.”
Here I went with em dash, no space, and lowercasing the repeated fragment. What do you think? Do these three examples even belong in the same category?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31775. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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