Punctuation question: quotation marks around names in dialog?
Solution 1:
You can use quotations or possibly even bare, but I think the best option would be to use italics, since that's more common for when talking about words as words (in this case, it's a name as a word):
- “Yeah, I agree with you there. Jon is pretty common, but the same could be said of Jeffrey, too”
- “I could go with the name Jon, sure, but I prefer Jeff instead; or maybe since my last name’s Thomas, I’ll go with Tommy.”
I would do the same inside or outside of quotation marks, though.