From: Dana Shilling dshilling@worldnet.att.net
Actually, in a really great fanfic it should be possible to remove the character names and still know who's talking.
I have noticed this a couple of times. Judith Seaman can do it. It's not something I look out for, though. It's probably easier to spot characters talking out of character than in because it clashes with our expectations.
What grates me most in fanfic dialogue is the way many writers try to capture the exact phrasing of lines with lots of superfluous italics and '...'s (forgotten the technical term for them), together with a liberal peppering of adverbs. If we know who's talking and we've got a firm enough grasp of the context, we should be able to hear the lines the way they're supposed to be delivered.
Neil