| Author |
Message |
Donna Richoux
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:01 am
Post subject: Re: Spee chactsin prose |
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Gerald Smyth <geraldsmyth1@yahoo.com> wrote:
| Quote: | In prose, should or should not each speech-act be marked by a new
paragraph?...g
|
[snip discussion of "speech-act"]
| Quote: |
ONE day when Zi Lu was walking in town he met a few of his former
companions. Though not quite villains, they were licentious vagabonds,
and none too scrupulous. Zi Lu stopped for a while to talk to them.
One of them looked Zi Lu's attire up and down and said: ¼So this is
the scholarly garb. It's a pretty shabby outfit'. He also said: ¼Don't
you miss your longsword?'. Receiving no response, he then came out
with something Zi Lu could not ignore: ¼Isn't that teacher Kong Qiu a
bit of a hypocrite? When he puts on a solemn face and expounds things
he doesn't believe as if they were true, he really looks as if he
could make a good thing out of it'.
ONE day when Zi Lu was walking in town he met a few of his former
companions. Though not quite villains, they were licentious vagabonds,
and none too scrupulous. Zi Lu stopped for a while to talk to them.
One of them looked Zi Lu's attire up and down and said:
¼So this is the scholarly garb. It's a pretty shabby outfit.'
He also said:
¼Don't you miss your longsword?'
Receiving no response, he then came out with something Zi Lu
could not ignore:
¼Isn't that teacher Kong Qiu a bit of a hypocrite? When he puts
on a solemn face and expounds things he doesn't believe as if they
were true, he really looks as if he could make a good thing out of
it.'
|
This is interesting. (The quotation mark problem is going to have to be
solved by a.u.e readers -- Substitute quotes for ¼ or whatever you see
there. Avoiding curly quotes would prevent this.).
One thought: special literature like foreign translations, ancient
documents, and folklore can be exempted from the usual rules that would
apply to, say, modern detective novels or newspaper feature stories. The
writer may be trying to convey something about the way the original
story was written or told, or have other special needs (like cramming a
thousand fables into a limited number of pages.) Is some notion of
historical or linguistic accuracy more important than making a story
easy to read -- that sort of thing. So because this thing looks like a
translation of an old Chinese story, it's not so strange to see it all
in one paragraph. It quite likely corresponded to "one paragraph" in
Chinese, whatever that would mean.
Other thought. When a speaker pauses for no particular reason, or so
that the narrator can describe a gesture or small action, it's quite
common to keep those remarks within the same paragraph. That would apply
to your first and second quotations in your second approach; I would
expect them to be in the same paragraph. But the third quotation is
nicely set off by an introduction that marks this as important, so it
seems very appropriate for it to be in a paragraph by itself.
So, like so many other things, there is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
Not the way I see it.
--
Best -- Donna Richoux
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John Dean
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:01 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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Donna Richoux wrote:
| Quote: |
I never calculated how long it would take to read a speech like that
out loud. It looks like about 12 words per line, 50 lines per page...
How long would it take to read 30,000 words out loud, roughly? Is a
rate of 100 words/min reasonable? 300 min would be 5 hours -- my
gosh, the country could actually maybe truly *have* been transfixed
for that long without sending out for pizza. At least it's not fifty
hours or five hundred or something.
|
Castro's speech to the UN in 1960 is credited with being 4 hours 26
minutes in the delivering. The English text is at
http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro/1960/19600926
I copied & pasted into Word and, minus the topping and tailing it stats
out at 18,828 words which renders down to 71 words a minute. Whether the
Spanish original varied much in word count I dunno. I suspect not.
Is Castro's rhetorical style much different from other orators? Is more
or less fond of the dramatic pause? Does he like to machine-gun through
the background? Don't know.
But if the speech you reference were read by Fidel, it would take over 7
hours. Since we know Fidel has delivered speeches of 8 hours, it's all
terribly feasible.
--
John Dean
Oxford |
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Richard Maurer
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:02 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
Does anyone have a copy of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (Ayn
Rand) handy? I forget which of the two it was, as I read them about
30 years ago, but as I recall one of them has a single speech that
goes on for about one third of the whole (very long) book.
Donna Richoux wrote:
Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, the monumental speech in Atlas Shrugged.
A mysterious character seizes control of the TV broadcasting system
and begins a speech on Page 936, which continues uninterrupted,
until Page 993.
993 minus 936 equals 57.
Total pages in book (paperback), 1084.
57/1084 = 5%
I would have guessed it went on for over a hundred pages, myself,
so both our memories exaggerated. However, it was such
an outrageous, clunky, unforgivable betrayal of the
reader's expectations -- this was a climactic moment of the plot! --
I don't think any jury would convict us of slander.
My 30 year old memory is that one of her thousand page books did have
the drama stand still for a 300 page exposition of her
political philosophy. I don't think that was a single speech.
It did remove the desire to read another one.
-- ---------------------------------------------
Richard Maurer To reply, remove half
Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Jim Ward
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:00 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 18:22:19 -0500, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:
Whom is John Galt?
Taggart Transcontinental sounds so 1960s. How about Inter-Taggart? |
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Spehro Pefhany
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:00 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 22:48:19 GMT, the renowned rzed <jello@comics.com>
wrote:
| Quote: | trio@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote in
news:1gnk5oq.1kx1k3djop5ozN%trio@euronet.nl:
[...]
Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, the monumental speech in Atlas Shrugged. A
mysterious character seizes control of the TV broadcasting
system and begins a speech on Page 936, which continues
uninterrupted, until Page 993.
One of the high points of literature, indeed. It's no wonder people
everywhere were asking "Who is <mysterious character>"? There would
probably have been T-shirts in a later era. Ayn Rand missed out by
being ahead of her time.
|
Indeed: http://www.victorystore.com/johngalt.htm
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com |
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Roland Hutchinson
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:02 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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Donna Richoux wrote:
| Quote: | Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> wrote:
Paul Wolff <bounceme@two.wolff.co.uk> wrote
[...]
When I was about 11 years old, having noticed that when, in novels, a
character made a long speech that extended into a second paragraph, the
new paragraph was given an initial quotation mark (double inverted
commas, as ") without the previous paragraph having been closed in this
way, I marked successive speech paragraphs in the same way in my
schoolwork. I was very annoyed to be severely criticised for it.
[...]
Does anyone have a copy of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (Ayn
Rand) handy?
Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, the monumental speech in Atlas Shrugged. A
mysterious character seizes control of the TV broadcasting system and
begins a speech on Page 936, which continues uninterrupted, until Page
993.
[...]
All one chapter. Conventional punctuation: double quote at start of each
paragraph, no close quote at end of any paragraph until page 993.
|
Why, that's nothing.
Practically the entire narrative -- chapters three through almost the end of
chapter twelve -- of H G Wells' The Time Machine are a single speech (not
in the sense of a speech before a large audience, but a single continuous
utterance by the protagonist). It is punctuated with a quotation mark at
the beginning of every paragraph. Each of chapters three through eleven
ends without a closing quotation mark -- which finally arrives near the end
of chapter 13, just a few paragraphs before the end of book (which closes
with a brief epilogue after the end of that chapter).
--
Roland Hutchinson Will play viola da gamba for food.
NB mail to my.spamtrap [at] verizon.net is heavily filtered to
remove spam. If your message looks like spam I may not see it. |
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Donna Richoux
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 6:01 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
|
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Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:
| Quote: | Donna Richoux wrote:
Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> wrote:
Paul Wolff <bounceme@two.wolff.co.uk> wrote
[...]
When I was about 11 years old, having noticed that when, in novels, a
character made a long speech that extended into a second paragraph, the
new paragraph was given an initial quotation mark (double inverted
commas, as ") without the previous paragraph having been closed in this
way, I marked successive speech paragraphs in the same way in my
schoolwork. I was very annoyed to be severely criticised for it.
[...]
Does anyone have a copy of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (Ayn
Rand) handy?
Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, the monumental speech in Atlas Shrugged. A
mysterious character seizes control of the TV broadcasting system and
begins a speech on Page 936, which continues uninterrupted, until Page
993.
[...]
All one chapter. Conventional punctuation: double quote at start of each
paragraph, no close quote at end of any paragraph until page 993.
Why, that's nothing.
Practically the entire narrative -- chapters three through almost the end of
chapter twelve -- of H G Wells' The Time Machine are a single speech (not
in the sense of a speech before a large audience, but a single continuous
utterance by the protagonist). It is punctuated with a quotation mark at
the beginning of every paragraph. Each of chapters three through eleven
ends without a closing quotation mark -- which finally arrives near the end
of chapter 13, just a few paragraphs before the end of book (which closes
with a brief epilogue after the end of that chapter).
|
That reminded me of "Frankenstein" -- the creature tells his story in
the middle of the book, and the story goes on, uninterrupted, for
chapters. I found my copy; there are opening quote marks for each
paragraph, but in this case closing quotes at the end of each chapter.
Dramatic-structure-wise, it (1) doesn't compare to the John Galt
lecture, which does not further the story one whit, but only expounds on
the author's economic theories. The story that Frankenstein's creature
tells is the heart of the tale and I suspect your HG Wells example is
more like that.
[(1) Had to revise one of those awful sentence dilemmas: "it, and I
suspect your HG Wells example, don't/doesn't..." There should be choice
that sounds good.]
--
Best - Donna Richoux |
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Bill Bonde ( ``And the La
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 6:02 am
Post subject: Re: the speech in Atlas Shrugged [WAS: Spee chactsin prose] |
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Donna Richoux wrote:
| Quote: |
Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:
Donna Richoux wrote:
Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> wrote:
Paul Wolff <bounceme@two.wolff.co.uk> wrote
[...]
When I was about 11 years old, having noticed that when, in novels, a
character made a long speech that extended into a second paragraph, the
new paragraph was given an initial quotation mark (double inverted
commas, as ") without the previous paragraph having been closed in this
way, I marked successive speech paragraphs in the same way in my
schoolwork. I was very annoyed to be severely criticised for it.
[...]
Does anyone have a copy of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (Ayn
Rand) handy?
Yes. Ah, yes, indeed, the monumental speech in Atlas Shrugged. A
mysterious character seizes control of the TV broadcasting system and
begins a speech on Page 936, which continues uninterrupted, until Page
993.
[...]
All one chapter. Conventional punctuation: double quote at start of each
paragraph, no close quote at end of any paragraph until page 993.
Why, that's nothing.
Practically the entire narrative -- chapters three through almost the end of
chapter twelve -- of H G Wells' The Time Machine are a single speech (not
in the sense of a speech before a large audience, but a single continuous
utterance by the protagonist). It is punctuated with a quotation mark at
the beginning of every pa ragraph.Eachofchaptersthreethrougheleven
ends without a closing quotation mark -- which finally arrives near the end
of chapter 13, just a few paragraphs before the end of book (which closes
with a brief epilogue after the end of that chapter).
That reminded me of "Frankenstein" -- the creature tells his story in
the middle of the book, and the story goes on, uninterrupted, for
chapters. I found my copy; there are opening quote marks for each
paragraph, but in this case closing quotes at the end of each chapter.
Dramatic-structure-wise, it (1) doesn't compare to the John Galt
lecture, which does not further the story one whit, but only expounds on
the author's economic theories. The story that Frankenstein's creature
tells is the heart of the tale and I suspect your HG Wells example is
more like that.
Trying to write in the third person and the 1st person in the same |
novel. |
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Gerald Smyth
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:06 pm
Post subject: Re: Spee chactsin prose |
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|
trio@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote in message news:<1gnkf1m.18nerc57ciuw0N%trio@euronet.nl>...
| Quote: | Gerald Smyth <geraldsmyth1@yahoo.com> wrote:
In prose, should or should not each speech-act be marked by a new
paragraph?...g
[snip discussion of "speech-act"]
ONE day when Zi Lu was walking in town he met a few of his former
companions. Though not quite villains, they were licentious vagabonds,
and none too scrupulous. Zi Lu stopped for a while to talk to them.
One of them looked Zi Lu's attire up and down and said: 'So this is
the scholarly garb. It's a pretty shabby outfit'. He also said: 'Don't
you miss your longsword?'. Receiving no response, he then came out
with something Zi Lu could not ignore: 'Isn't that teacher Kong Qiu a
bit of a hypocrite? When he puts on a solemn face and expounds things
he doesn't believe as if they were true, he really looks as if he
could make a good thing out of it'.
ONE day when Zi Lu was walking in town he met a few of his former
companions. Though not quite villains, they were licentious vagabonds,
and none too scrupulous. Zi Lu stopped for a while to talk to them.
One of them looked Zi Lu's attire up and down and said:
'So this is the scholarly garb. It's a pretty shabby outfit.'
He also said:
'Don't you miss your longsword?'
Receiving no response, he then came out with something Zi Lu
could not ignore:
'Isn't that teacher Kong Qiu a bit of a hypocrite? When he puts
on a solemn face and expounds things he doesn't believe as if they
were true, he really looks as if he could make a good thing out of
it.'
This is interesting. (The quotation mark problem is going to have to be
solved by a.u.e readers -- Substitute quotes for ¼ or whatever you see
there. Avoiding curly quotes would prevent this.[Corrected above-GS]).
One thought: special literature like foreign translations, ancient
documents, and folklore can be exempted from the usual rules that would
apply to, say, modern detective novels or newspaper feature stories. The
writer may be trying to convey something about the way the original
story was written or told, or have other special needs (like cramming a
thousand fables into a limited number of pages.) Is some notion of
historical or linguistic accuracy more important than making a story
easy to read -- that sort of thing. So because this thing looks like a
translation of an old Chinese story, it's not so strange to see it all
in one paragraph. It quite likely corresponded to "one paragraph" in
Chinese, whatever that would mean.
|
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
The piece is translated from a Japanese novella, which in turn is
based on old Chinese texts. The first version is the original Japanese
paragraphing; the second has new paragraphs tentatively added by the
English translator. The translator doesn't think there would have been
any paragraphing in the original Chinese texts specifically to take
account of speech; and in the Japanese text he sees no systematic
method of dealing with speech: sometimes each speech-act by a new
speaker is given a new paragraph, sometimes not; sometimes
quotation-marks are used, sometimes not; when quotation-marks are not
used, sometimes what is being quoted is the unspoken thoughts of a
character.
| Quote: | Other thought. When a speaker pauses for no particular reason, or so
that the narrator can describe a gesture or small action, it's quite
common to keep those remarks within the same paragraph. That would apply
to your first and second quotations in your second approach; I would
expect them to be in the same paragraph. But the third quotation is
nicely set off by an introduction that marks this as important, so it
seems very appropriate for it to be in a paragraph by itself.
So, like so many other things, there is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
Not the way I see it.
|
You are probably right. At the moment, it seems to the translator that
the safest strategy might be to keep to the original Japanese
paragraphing - though that does mean having to put the full-stops
outside the quotation-marks:-)...g |
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Athel Cornish-Bowden
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 3:35 pm
Post subject: Re: Spee chactsin prose |
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|
"Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> wrote in message news:<306fjaF2sfragU1@uni-berlin.de>...
| Quote: | Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
Paul Wolff <bounceme@two.wolff.co.uk> wrote in message
news:<t4HMS5Su59mBFw4J@fpwolff.demon.co.uk>...
[ ... ]
But aren't "quotations" different from "speech" in style-guide terms?
The indented style is for quotations from other texts, rather than
for speech in one's own text. (Have I missed something in the
discussion?)
Good point. I wondered about this a bit when composing my original |
message, but decided that it was OK, because the difference you note,
while in practice real, seems to me to derive from the fact that in
novels (Atlas Shrugged aside) characters tend to limit themselves to a
few words or a couple of sentences, whereas long quotations are more
common in non-fiction. But a short quotation in a work of non-fiction
is usually treated like a brief remark in a novel, and I think that a
long speech in a novel needs something similar to what one would use
in non-fiction.
There is, of course, a good reason for omitting the closing quotation
marks at the end of each paragraph in a long speech in a novel: novels
often record a conversation with just the quotation marks (i.e.
omitting "he said", "she replied" etc.), and the closing quotation
marks followed by opening quotation marks at the beginning of the next
paragraph alerts the reader to the change of speaker. In long
conversations I easily get confused, and have to go down with my
finger alternating "he", "she"... until I get to the statement whose
speaker is not clear. This is probably one reason why I have found Ivy
Compton-Burnett unreadable, even though I enjoyed a stage production
of "A Heritage and its History".
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm |
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Robert Bannister
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:03 am
Post subject: Re: Spee chactsin prose |
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Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
| Quote: | goes on for about one third of the whole (very long) book. It would be
interesting to check how she (or her publisher) handled the multiple
paragraphs to make it clear that the speech was continuing through
several chapters.
|
I used to love those bits in Caesar where the reported speech would
frequently go on for 2 or more pages, with only the subjunctive forms
giving you a reminder that this is what "he" said.
--
Rob Bannister |
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Robert Bannister
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Nov 26, 2004 6:03 am
Post subject: Re: Spee chactsin prose |
|
|
Paul Wolff wrote:
| Quote: | In message <slrncpmagl.27ju.eighner@goodwill.io.com>, Lars Eighner
eighner@io.com> writes
In our last episode,
6bf07756.0411161826.18d99c00@posting.google.com>, the lovely and
talented Gerald Smyth broadcast on alt.usage.english:
In prose, should or should not each speech-act be marked by a new
paragraph?...g
Not necessarily. The important thing is not to mix speakers-actors
in the same paragraph. If there is action in a paragraph with speech(es)
the speaker and the one who act must be the same.
When I was about 11 years old, having noticed that when, in novels, a
character made a long speech that extended into a second paragraph, the
new paragraph was given an initial quotation mark (double inverted
commas, as ") without the previous paragraph having been closed in this
way, I marked successive speech paragraphs in the same way in my
schoolwork. I was very annoyed to be severely criticised for it.
I could see that it would remind the reader that the speech was
continuing. Is there any good reason for its being correct in print but
not in manuscript? Teecher didn't offer any explanation for this
publishers' practice that I now remember.
|
All I know is that I find the practice extremely annoying. I see a new
paragraph with inverted commas and assume it's a new speaker. I am
pleased to see that some modern publishers no longer do this.
--
Rob Bannister |
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