The trend of dropping quotation marks from dialogue has become increasingly popular amongst authors of the contemporary literature genre. This development was brought into the BookTok spotlight with Sally Roony’s Normal People, which is lauded for its unique and uncanny style. Part of what makes this book so unique is its lack of quotation marks, for dialogue or otherwise. 

Some readers find the choice to be disorienting, but others feel this particular style allows them to be brought even further into the folds of the narrative. Removing quotation marks  is a stylistic choice that’s been rapidly gaining popularity in recent decades. Many popular authors — Cormac McCarthy, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma, and Ali Smith being just a few examples — have incorporated the lack of quotation marks into their writing style.

Miriam Toews, an acclaimed Canadian author, said in an interview with The Walrus that she “didn’t want quotation marks to slow her down”. In her book A Complicated Kindness, the absence of quotation marks allows “the text [to] lean, uninterrupted, into the jagged stream of consciousness” of the narrator, a surly teenager who is “trying to maintain an ironic distance even from her most difficult emotions”, as The Walrus puts it. In addition, the absence of quotation marks creates a certain degree of separation between the words and their relation to reality. The Walrus calls this “a successful union of form and content”.

Toews’ most recent book, Fight Night, also lacks quotation marks, but this time the narrator is an eight-year-old consigned to lamenting and relaying the crazy choices of the not-so-responsible adults in her life. It is once again the simple removal of quotation marks that allows the narrative to take on the unmistakable voice of a child telling a story, and with that comes the unique and peculiar ways in which children specifically perceive and interpret the world around them. When the barriers of quotation marks are removed, so is the barrier of reality. 

In fact, many authors writing from the perspective of unreliable narrators have found the choice to be a particularly appealing one, as a quotation mark implies an objective presentation of the speech as it happened, which is not always what these types of narrators can offer. 

Other authors choose to drop the quote marks for the sake of their own writing process: Dorothy Richardson, author of the novel sequence Pilgrimage, felt she needed the freedom to write “without formal obstructions” in order to achieve a truly revolutionary work. Her series consists of thirteen books, and she refers to each as a “chapter”.

Some authors, still, just don’t like the look of so many markings on the page.

Whatever the reasons, this new development in the writing world makes for some fun reads.