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/