Onomatopoeia and caps lock

[Wayne Mack]

I tend to use common place sounds and find two different scenarios. If the sound has no shock or surprise value to the PoV, I just incorporate it in regular text as part of a full sentence,

"The microwave dinged."​

If, though, the sound is a surprise to the PoV, I italicize it and place it on its own line, often sans punctuation,

Bang​

My logic is that the unattributed noise will cause the reader to wonder, "Where did that come from?" and echo the feeling from the PoV.

 

[sknox]

It gets complicated in my own writing. I have, in just about every story,
Onomatopoeia
Foreign language words
Magical or otherwise invented words
Emphasis
Internal dialog

What typographic possibilities are available for all these? Exactly three: italics, boldface, and fonts. I won't use boldface for any of them. All caps is right out; didn't even make the list. Fonts are possible, but tedious to implement and nightmarish to proof.

Which leaves italics. I use them primarily for internal dialog and foreign language words. This generally words fine, so long as I'm careful not to use a foreign term inside internal dialog. Invented words just get plopped down, but I do try to introduce them in dialog, so it's easy to set those off verbally. Emphasis should be handled by word choice, not punctuation.

All this gets tossed in the jumbler when we get to audiobooks. I'm only just starting to encounter that.