Internal Monologue Formatting
How to mark a character's unspoken thought: italics, quotation marks, or nothing at all.
Fiction has three standard conventions for direct thought. Italics with no quotation marks (This will end badly, she thought) is the most common in contemporary trade publishing. Quotation marks treating thought as speech is older and now rare, because readers expect quotation marks to mean audible words. Roman type with no marks at all, distinguished only by the tag or the narrative voice, is the norm in free indirect style.
Whichever you choose, apply it consistently and only to direct thought — the words as thought, in the present tense of the character's mind. Indirect thought ('she thought it would end badly') is ordinary narration and takes no special formatting; italicising it makes the page shout.
Free indirect discourse deserves separate mention because it deliberately blurs the boundary: the narrator's third person carries the character's diction without any marker. Austen, Flaubert, and Woolf built whole novels on it, and adding italics to those passages would destroy the effect the technique exists to create.
Common mistake: mixing italics for thought with italics for emphasis and for foreign words in the same paragraph. When three jobs share one signal, the reader stops trusting it — reserve italics for thought in a thought-heavy scene and find another route to emphasis.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Keep reading the glossary
The short attributive phrase — 'she said', 'he replied' — that identifies the speaker of a line of quoted dialogue.
The punctuation that signals direct speech or a quoted phrase — single or double, depending on locale.
A parenthetical note telling the reader that italics or bolding in a quotation come from the quoter, not the original author.
Italics for whole, self-contained works; quotation marks for parts contained within them.