Dialogue Tips
Dialogue Tips For Your Story or Personal Essay
For personal essays:
Think of a moment in your story that you can dramatize/that involves two people
Think of a moment in this episode of your life where you said “no” to another person/had some sort of conflict
It's okay to “make up” dialogue as long as it’s true to the feeling and memory of the situation (nobody remembers exactly what was said in a conversation)
Your dialogue needn’t be long, but you have to have some dialogue in your essay.
You must use proper dialogue formatting unless you consciously choose not to (in other words, you know the rules, but want to bend them for effect.)
Make sure to indent every time a new person speaks.
Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.
If in doubt, consult any published work with traditional dialogue for proper formatting.
Dialogue Tips from Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
Have your characters speak no more than three sentences at a time—unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.
Dialogue is more interesting when characters are saying no to each other.
Keep exposition out of dialogue.
Let your characters conceal or avoid instead of saying exactly what they mean.
Use “said” as a dialogue tag wherever possible.
Use an action rather than a modifier to show how a character is feeling.
Cut to the chase. Don’t use dialogue that doesn’t move the story forward and reveal character.
Don’t let your characters be too articulate. Fragments are fine. Don’t force conversations to follow a logical order (question followed by answer). No need to stay on the same subject or include clear transitions from one subject to another.
Vernacular is best conveyed by word choice and syntax as opposed to misspellings.
Dialogue Formatting:
Best is to look at published dialogue in print novels you've in or out of school.
Here's a good website for basic rules for formatting dialogue
This website, however, shows extra spaces between lines of dialogue, which is NOT standard. Do not follow the spacing on this website: http://firstmanuscript.com/format-dialogue/