Italics or quote marks in telepathic speech?

I've seen this done several different ways, and I wonder if it varies with editor and author. In David Gemmell's books telepathic speech was often just formatted as ordinary text, and it was the context which made it clear that it was telepathic speech. In David Eddings books they used italics, and italics weren't used for anything else. Terry Pratchett just formatted it as spoken speech but then made it clear it was telepathy. Maybe you could do it similarly to the way you report the characters internal thoughts?

 

I will say that in my own writing, I wrote a long story and used Italics as a way of showing that the language was not the base language the rest of the story was in. In one of the edits, I removed it, and I actually could not tell the difference. I never had confusion that the languages were different. So, it ended up being a lot of work over nothing.

In my current one, some people have outside forces speak into their thoughts. I am currently using double quotes for speech and single quotes for thoughts.

It might look like this.

"Hey, that was my parking space!" said Tom, shoving his palm down on the horn of his golf cart.

'He stole it,' said the voice. 'He knew it was yours.'

"Whadya talkin about?" said the other driver. "I wuz here first."

'He lies, kill him.'

"I'm not killing anyone over a parking space, I'll just use the garage on the outskirts, and walk in without the gold cart."

'You're weak,' said the voice.

"I'm not weak," said Tom.

"You're a nut," said the other driver.


Nor sure if I will keep it that way. But, so far it works for me.

 

If you put the sword's telepathic speech in italics, why would that be too many italics? Does the sword talk on and on for pages at a time?

Normally, internal thoughts aren't written in quotations. Specific punctuation for them isn't necessary, in my opinion. It can just be this:

Things had changed, she thought.

 

When ever I've seen telepathic speech in novels, I remember it usually being done in italics. ^_^

 

I recommend both italics and quotation marks.

Italics without quotation marks certainly gets some style points. It gets even more if it's a first person perspective, but I have to think it'd be annoying after more than, like, a chapter.

The reader is going to have to shift their thinking from, 'something is going on I should pay attention,' to, 'someone is talking. I should pay attention to that now.' With english we're trained to do that automatically whenever we see a " so the flow of the story is uninterrupted. No quotation marks? Well it's like there's tiny little speed bumps as the brain needs to take a second longer to switch its thinking.

As for italics.... well I'm reading a story right now that features a lot of mental communication. It also features general scheming, assassination plots and worst of all politics. I don't know if you plan on doing stuff like that, but if you do then it's very helpful to be able to tell just what a character should or should not know at a glance. Italics achieves this handsomely.