Grammar question...

[awanderingbard]

I've Googled this, but haven't be able to find an answer or didn't have the right phrase to find it.

When you're writing time in a story, what sort of formatting is grammatically correct? For example, I'm having a character give the timeline of a crime. He says 2 AM to begin with, which is fine, but after that he's going to drop the 'AM', because you don't tend to keep saying it when you're talking. So how do I write time after that? Would it be -

"I got the call around 3." (which looks weird)
or
"I got the call around three." (Which looks more like a number than a time.)

If it were in description, I'd keep the AM, but in dialogue it just sounds repetitive.

I've posted this to grammargeeks too, but I don't know how active it is. Anyone have a better grammar question community?

Completely off-topic: donutsweeper found me a Canadian spellchecker for my Firefox and it's awesome! When I turned it on, Googled suddenly became a word (the US one had it underlined) and it didn't try to correct 'dialogue' (the US always wants it to be 'dialog'). Yay!

Comments

[draickinphoenix.livejournal.com]

I don't know how correct this is, but I was taught that any number under 100 should be written out.

Supposedly this includes times, which always look funny to me in any form. I have agonized over this same thing many times, and ultimately found ways to keep times out of it at all... but when I do stick times in, they ususally look like this:

"I got the call around 3:00."

BECAUSE... I'm just too lazy to write out three o'clock.

Hope this helps!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

I like three as opposed to 3. I just read a story that had two people arranging to meet at a certain time and it used just the # not written out and it kind of pulled me out of the story, thinking to myself how dumb that looked

[luthorienne.livejournal.com]

We use numerals for time stated as time: 3:15, 3:00 a.m., etc. But if your character is saying, "I got in at three this morning," you'd spell that out.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

I'd use "three" for even hours, otherwise either "3:20" or "three-twenty" is correct. If you're posting fanfic, do whichever you prefer. If you're submitting, it'll be up to the publisher's house style.

Angie