“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.
“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement.
“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”
“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”
Things I didn’t know
“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”
You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.
Okay, but someone please explain question marks when followed by a dialogue tag. How do?
“The speech tag is still part of the previous sentence,” she explained, ‘so it isn’t capitalised.“
“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”
She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”
She reblogged the post again, because she had recently read far too many potentially enjoyable stories marred by poor dialogue punctuation.
I’ve only seen this post in screenshots till now..
NOICE. Can’t wait to use this
“There are two more ways"—she pointed to the blackboard—“to punctuate interruptions. One is with the em dashes outside the quotations marks to indicate continuous speech. The action occurs at the same time as speech. The other—” she sipped from a glass of water “—is em dashes within the quotation marks to indicate interrupted speech.”
“Neato,” she said, impressed by the easy-to-follow formatting.
“It can also get confusing to track when to capitalize dialogue tags,” Anne said, “because proper nouns like names are always capitalized, which muddies it up a bit.” “I see.” He stroked his chin. “And when an action breaks up a sentence and you aren’t using a dialogue tag, it is its own sentence, so the first word of it gets capitalized.”
Anne nodded. “Yes, but when the speech is followed by a dialogue tag that doesn’t start with a proper noun,” she continued, “you don’t capitalize it, like I mentioned before.” “Even if it’s an exclamation point or question mark, right?” he asked. “Exactly!” Anne replied.
