Dialogue and Punctuation
August 8, 2007 at 5:57 pm | In Bria, dialogue, format, writing |We here at the Purple Hearts blog try to stay relatively Rant Free, but I have to tell you the dialogue pet peeves are stacking up.
I’m CPing for someone who cannot grasp the punctuation of dialogue, so I thought I would make the world a better place and run through the basics here.
Making a statement:
If the tag is first, a comma should be placed after the tag, before the quotation mark, and the period is inside the quote. If the tag appears after the statement, there is a comma before the second quotation mark.
She said, “blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah,” she said.
Middle of the statement tags:
If your tag is in the middle of the sentence, same rules basically apply.
“Blah blah,” she said, “blah blah blah.”
OR
“Blah blah,” she said. “Blah blah blah.”
Asking a question or exclaiming: When you ask a question or exclaim with tags/beats, the entire thing is written as one sentence. The question mark stays within the “” and the tag is still part of the sentence just like with a statement:
She asked, “Blah blah blah?” OR She shouted, “Blah!”
“Blah blah blah?” she asked. OR “Blah!” she shouted.
These are the basics. If anything here surprised you or you want some more in-depth examples, check out The Writer’s Writing Guide. Rachel Simon has a great page on punctuating dialogue. Also, if you EVER have a chance to attend one of Julia Quinn’s talks on dialogue, RUN, don’t walk, and get in line - it’s fabu!
And, Go Write
-bria
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This is very nicely done. My son in 11th grade wrote a short story for English class and he’s in Honors English and has always done well and he had no idea how to punctuate dialog.
Actually the one item that you didn’t cover which he also didn’t know was that each new speaker should be a new paragraph. Anyway, while I knew he had it wrong, I didn’t remember the rules well enough to state them and looked on the internet. Your explanation and examples are the best I’ve found so far!
But what is CPing?
Comment by Free Graphics — November 4, 2007 #
Oh, the embarrassment of getting caught in writer short hand. CPing - - if you see CP it means we’re talking about a Critique Partner - someone you trade stuff with and do a ‘rip apart and repair’ type of thing.
It can be anything from a cold read to see if you’re on target to specifically asked questions such as ‘Does my POV (point-of-view) slip?’ or ‘Am I Telling instead of Showing?’
And, you are absolutely correct about the dialogue paragraph rules —- although, I have read some recent Literary Fiction that has chosen to play by the old rules lately and have more than one person speaking in a paragraph.
Please Please Please don’t pick this rule to break - it’s very difficult on the reader and as a writer it’s extremely difficult to keep the rhythm of conversation clean.
Thanks for the comment and question! Hope your son is enjoying the class!
Comment by bphearts — November 5, 2007 #