What quotation marks normally do for a reader
Quotation marks are a visual boundary: they signal that a character’s words have begun and ended. Remove them, and the page gives readers fewer explicit cues. They must use other clues—such as a change in voice, a speech tag like she said, or the surrounding action—to identify dialogue and its speaker.
That extra work can be deliberate. An author may want the page to feel less segmented, or to let speech blend into narration and thought. In a conversation, the effect can make voices seem to spill into one another rather than arrive in neatly labeled turns. It can also slow a reader down, especially when several characters speak in quick succession.
Other cues take over
Writers who omit quotation marks often rely on a consistent alternative: a new paragraph for each speaker, dialogue tags, distinctive phrasing, or punctuation such as a dash. These cues do not all serve the same purpose. A paragraph break can show that the speaker has changed, while a tag identifies who is talking; a character’s distinctive vocabulary may help only after the reader has learned it.
The choice is therefore a tradeoff, not simply a matter of removing punctuation. Quotation marks make the boundaries easy to spot. Leaving them out can create a more continuous-looking page, but it asks the writer to make the surrounding signals especially clear—and the reader to keep track of them. In a crowded exchange, one missing speaker cue can turn a stylistic effect into genuine confusion.
