In narrative writing, should I use quotation marks or italics when I quote something someone wrote?
I would go with italics to differentiate written from spoken quotes:
“I know who the killer is,” she said and hung up the phone.
I know who the killer is, she wrote, but she never managed to send her message.
Best Answer
Normal style in narrative writing is to use quotes, not italics.
Some authors of fiction, notably James Joyce and William Gaddis, used an em dash at the beginning of a paragraph that started with a quote:
But that was an idiosyncratic usage. Since this is an element of style, you are free to do whatever you wish, but remember that you may only wind up confusing your audience if you stray too far from what they perceive to be customary.
Some authors use italics to denote what a character may be thinking:
Edit: Jen is asking about how to quote something a character is writing. Here is how I have mainly seen it done, with the entire written text offset. Note that I'm not good enough at formatting in these answers to make it exact, so I'm putting everything into a blockquote and then formatting the written part as code. But on a real page the background would be all white:
(The last paragraph would not be indented, but I can't seem to make that work with the formatting tools available to me here.)
The point is, representing writing on a written page is a different convention from representing speech or thought. Sometimes, if the writing consists of only a few words, a different font or use of uppercase lettering does the job: