okay, hi
so ive been debating to actually post this kind of thing
but u know what, I feel like I should post it.
its just something informative, not a rant AT ALL. :)
and I feel like we are all mature people, and its just a tip to make ur writing a little better.
so ive seen on wattpad people write dialogue in many different ways:
"I love you." He said.
"I love you.", he said.
"I love you." he said.
And whatever.
there are a lot of wrong ways to write dialogue and a lot of correct ways to write dialogue.
the stuff I just listed is p wrong.
now let me just list a bunch of right ways to write dialogue:
"I love you," he said.
He said, "I love you."
OR EVEN
"I love you," said he.
Said he, "I love you."
(it sounds a little awkward but its grammatically correct.)
^ think of dialogue as part of a the sentence. you dont want "he said" to be its own separate sentence, because it is a fragment. all punctuation is inside quotes, but there are some exceptions. for example, when you are asking a question and use a quote. the question mark goes outside:
What does he really mean by "I love you"?
but if its a question within the dialogue, it stays inside quotes: She asked him, "Do you really?"
you can also write it like this, just omit the comma and lower case the first word of the dialogue tag afterwards:
"Do you really?" she asked him.
then theres the times where you may want to put a "pause" in ur dialogue like such:
"Yeah," he said and admired her beauty. "A lot"
What I just did was make "Yeah" and "A lot." two separate sentences. "Yeah. A lot." you can even make it into one sentence and still put a pause.
"Yeah," he said and admired her beauty, "a lot."
just make sure you add the comma in the proper place and lower case the first word of the second part.
AND IF YA WANNA GET CRAZY YA CAN PUT QUOTES INSIDE THE QUOTES
you have to use the sing quote thingies ' ' (or apostrophes) inside the double quote thingies " " like so
"Well, 'I love you' doesn't cut it for me," she said.
theres a bunch of other ways you can do it. like I believe in some foreign countries they don't use quotes, they use those hyphen thingies. you know the longer ones thats like two hyphens combined. I forget what they are called sorry.
--Yeah,-- he said and admired her beauty, --a lot.--
I THINK THATS HOW U DO IT IDK I KNOW THE FRENCH DOES THIS HOLD ON LET ME LOOK THIS UP
NVM IM JUST STUPID LOL
oh also
dont use words like "laughed" or "smiled" in replace for "said"
because theyre not really speaking verbs, i guess. just think of it as "burped."
He burped the alphabet.
He laughed the alphabet.
It sounds kind of wrong tbh
okay, thats about it I guess. ive seen this problem commonly on wattpad, and I just thought id share the proper way to do it. It would be kind of rude to do a rant on it, bc maybe you guys just dont get educated, bc some schools dont even teach creative writing. so I just educated u :). I hope u learned something today. also, if u want a link to a source I used, I can provide it.
so yeah guess wat with this little tip u can amaze ur english teachers when u write a story. or when u write fanfiction. idk this thing is just a pet peeve of mine oKAY
