Dialogue is an important part of any story so it's important to know how to punctuate it.
All examples in this chapter come from the book The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart.
First of all, speech should be in quotation mark. You can do that two ways, either with quotation marks or apostrophes.
"Because there was a girl who cheated?"
Or
'Because there was a girl who cheated?'
If the dialogue is a sentence that is followed by a speech tag, you replace the period with a comma. However, if the character asks a question or ends in an exclamation, you keep the question mark or exclamation mark. Remember that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.
"I doubt I could have done it," Reynie remarked.
"Other questions?" said Mr. Benedict.
"But you've learned a great deal!" protested Number Two.
If a character is quoting someone, the quote will be in apostrophes inside the quotation marks or vice versa.
"The man cried, 'What? You're lying!'"
Or
'The man cried, "What? You're lying!"'
When a character is giving a speech or telling a story, they might need to speak for several paragraphs. If the character is going to continue speaking, you don't put quotation marks at the end of the paragraph but you do at the beginning of the next paragraph.
"Imagine then how amazed I was to discover that I knew what the little device was for. I slipped it into the lock of my handcuffs (my fingers seemed to know what they were doing, though I did not), and just as we came to a stairway, I heard the lock spring -- I'd picked it in less than a minute. Before they knew I was free, I had knelt down and cuffed the men's ankles together. Then I hopped out of reach, and my captors, trying to pursue, fell on their faces. Before they could regain their feet, I had picked the locks on the ankle cuffs, snapped them onto the men's wrists, and bounded down the stairs.
"After that, my getaway was fairly simple. I broke out into the darkness of a rainy night. I was pursued, of course, but I made my way through a hilly terrain until I came to a cliff overlooking the harbor. The water looked shallow and lay about a hundred feet below me, but as I had no other choice, I dove straightaway. There followed some troublesome business of swimming to the mainland while pursuers in boats tried to capture me with nets and hooks, that sort of thing. But I proved a good swimmer, and the rocks in the channel are terrible for boats. In the end I escaped."
YOU ARE READING
Ten Ways to Improve Your Story Writing
RandomI don't know how many stories I have come across that have had a really good plot but have been nearly impossible to read. This book is a list of ten different things that can improve your writing. Most of them have to do with grammar.
