Rules for Writing Dialogue

The following rules should help you learn to write dialogue properly. In addition to these hints on form, please remember that dialogue should be natural for the characters speaking (be sure to keep in mind your characters’ personality traits).

1. Use quotation marks around the words spoken by the character: “It’s sure cold out here,“ Mark said.

2. Begin a new paragraph each time a different person speaks – this can help to cut down on the number of dialogue signal phrases required. Also, remember to indent the beginning of each dialogue paragraph, just as you would in any other type of writing. It's not a bad idea to begin a new paragraph after the dialogue has ended.

3. Only the exact words of a person are in quotation marks. Also, when splitting a quotation with a dialogue tag, do not capitalize words which do not begin new sentences. For example:

 “I really don’t know,” he said, “whether she loves me or not.”

4. Periods and commas are always placed inside the quotation marks as in the examples above.

5. An exclamation point (!) or a question mark (?) is placed inside the quotation marks when it punctuates a quotation, but outside the quotation when it punctuates the main sentence. Check out the two examples below:

She looked at me and asked, “Are you alright?” (? punctuates the quote)

Did the teacher really say, “Finish this today”? (? punctuates the main sentence)

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