Using font to highlight a god's speech in dialogue
At one point in my story, the characters are addressed by a god. In the ensuing dialogue, this god has a more archaic way of speaking, but even so, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to visually distinguish the god's speech from the other characters' speech. I think part of the reason is that since this is essentially a disembodied voice talking, I can't use the usual visual cues (gestures, facial expressions, etc) to highlight who is speaking.
I don't want to capitalize everything as I find long stretches of capitalized text hard to read, and I'm already using italics for thoughts and emphasis. Since the story is going to be published online, I can't rely on displaying the text in an actually different font, either.
However, I've played around with increasing the size a bit and I think it looks okay. But are there any reasons not to do this?
EDIT: Since it was raised in a comment and I didn't think about it before:
While the god's speech is usually on a separate line, occasionally it's interspersed with speech tags and descriptions. Would it be problematic to have different sizes in the same paragraph? (FWIW, in my current draft I'm using a difference of 2 size points.)
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47729. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Visually distinguishing a character's dialogue is not a bad idea. Sir Terry Pratchett used this tool quite a lot. Most notably, his Death spoke in ALL CAPS, including small caps when needed. (Small caps make reading significantly easier than just all caps.) There was also a special font used for the Golems' speech in Feet of Clay, a character in The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents spoke in bold, and that's just off the top of my head.
In all those cases, Pratchett used the special fonts to illustrate the fact that the voice speaking is very much an inhuman voice. Which is also what you're trying to convey.
What I would check is whether different-sized fonts render correctly on e-readers, as well as on different browsers. Any environment that lets the user change font size - you'd have to make sure it interacts well with your "bigger font". I'm not tech-savvy enough to answer that issue.
To sum up, using some font effect to illustrate the inhumanity of a character's voice in text is perfectly fine. Using font size, specifically - make sure there are no technical issues.
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