Every time you feel like you would turn your head and look at a different character, either because they’ve started to speak, or you're anticipating their reply, that’s when you would start a new paragraph. 💡Pro tip: Imagine you’re watching the conversation play out in front of you in real life. Whenever the focus moves from one speaker to the other, that’s when change lines. The new paragraph doesn’t always have to start with direct quotes. “What do you think you’re doing?” asked the policeman. To make it easier for readers to follow what’s happening, start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes, even if you’re using dialogue tags. This is one of the most fundamental rules of organizing dialogue. Start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes If the utterance (to use a fancy linguistics term for dialogue 🤓) ends in a question mark or exclamation point, they would also be placed inside the quotation marks.ģ. If the speaker is attributed before the dialogue, there is a comma outside the quotation marks.Īleela whimpered, “I don’t want to. “Come closer so I can see you,” said the old man. When the speaker is attributed after the dialogue, you insert a comma inside the quotation marks. This is what we call “attribution” when you're punctuating dialogue. The most common way to indicate speech is to write dialogue in quotation marks and attribute it to a speaker with dialogue tags, such as he said, she said or Margaret replied or chirped Hiroko. In those cases, the period is not used for spoken dialogue but for quoting sentence fragments, or perhaps when styling the title of a short story like ‘The Gift of the Magi’.īut what about other types of punctuation?
#Character story planner app dialogue broken full
You might see British editors occasionally place a period (or full stop, as they say) outside the quote marks. When completing a spoken sentence, you should always have the period inside the quote. Misplaced periods are the most common mistake writers make when punctuating dialogue. Put punctuation inside the quote marks (with some exceptions)
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