posted
With the modern-day emphasis in story on reader immersion and least disruptive special formatting, thoughts are ideally run into paragraph bodies in roman text with context unequivocably indicating the thinker and the thought.
Setting short passages of thoughts in italics has been a functional tradition for centuries, but preferences have been moving away from that for decades in some circles. Italicized thoughts cause confusion with italics used for emphasis, which is also deprecated in some circles. Long soliloquy-like passages of thoughts set in standard manuscript format with underlining indicating italics can be very jarring to a weary screening reader's eyes.
Bracketing thoughts in quote marks sets some grammarians at odds. It's not dialogue, does setting thought off in quotes make it confusing?
Tagging a thought with he thought, or the like, isn't as deprecated yet as italics or quote bracketing, but it's getting there.
The emerging preferred method is to so totally immerse readers in a point of view character's thoughts that no special indication is needed to recognize a thought as a thought and who thinks it.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 16, 2009).]
posted
I'm inclined towards indicating a character's thoughts in italics (when set in type) or underlining (when typewritten), but not by enclosing them in quotation marks.
Then again, generally I keep the thoughts to a minimum---generally no logner than Farnsworth's thought above. Often as not, I don't even underline, preferring to save that for emphasizing a word or two, or indicating a title, or somesuch.
Then again again...thoughts tend to be on the disjointed side, long, stream-of-consciousness things, often sentenceless, that if written down straight, really take up a lot of space on the printed page. (I remember a chapter of Titus Groan, where the characters sit around a table and their thoughts are all written out. Interesting enough, I thought, but can I handle something like that myself?
(See? There's a thought. And I didn't underline it.)