While writing a short memoir for a college course, I wrote the dialogue without quotation marks, the biggest reason being that I do not like how clunky it looks in Times New Roman. I do not mind it with other fonts, but when I look at it in Times New Roman, it just feels like it is affecting the mood of the piece. Instead, I am separating dialogue into their own line as the speaker switches. I did not worry until another student in the peer review wrote quotation marks around all of my dialogue.
This assignment is the closest to creative writing that I will have in this class, so if I do decide not to use quotation marks, I want to be able to defend that choice to my professor.
So what are reasons that writers will omit quotation marks from dialogue?
Best Answer
Typography and rules of punctuation are entirely in the purview of the venue, and should NOT be varied for reasons as ephemeral as whether or not you like the glyph used by a specific font.
If you don't like the quotation marks of a font, the right answer is to use a different font. While writing you can use whatever font you want; when you have in your memoir, follow the specific guidelines specified by your instructor, editor, agent, or publisher. If they say "use this font" it's likely because they are used to that font and want to evaluate your writing, not your ascetic taste in typography.
By the way, quotation marks are required in English narrative writing when including the exact words of another voice, which definitely includes any spoken dialog in prose. Inserting a paragraph break between speakers is likewise part of how to write dialog.
You could omit the quotation marks if you were writing a script, but then you're writing a script and not a narrative.