LogFAQs > #976541258

Lopen posted...

-- for brief pause
... for longer pause

Any other thing you can use a period. No need to be splicing commas

Depends on the character and their delivery. I use dashes and ellipses for types of pause rather than merely length, and with some characters, it can get way too punctuation heavy if you use these every time you want the reader to parse their speech with separation. For an OC, I would still never do this, but I've been writing fanfiction lately, and when the reader knows a character and how they're portrayed vocally, you want to emulate that. Sadly, simply writing "<character name> said," is not enough to force that. At least not in my head when I subvocalize it. I want to use every trick at my disposal, and sometimes that means using a questionable comma as long as it isn't incredibly forced.

I'll look for an example next time I'm revising.