âThis is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,â she said with a smile.
âUnless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.â He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement.Â
âHowever,â she added, shifting in her seat, âitâs appropriate to use a comma if thereâs action in the middle of a sentence.â
âTrue.â She glanced at the others. âYou can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.â
Things I didnât know
âAndââ she waved a pen as though to underline her statementââif youâre interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.â
You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didnât know any of this when writing their stories.
Okay, but someone please explain question marks when followed by a dialogue tag. How do?
âThe speech tag is still part of the previous sentence,â she explained, âso it isnât capitalised.â
âWhat do you mean?â he asked. âBut thereâs a full stop as part of the question mark!â
She nodded gravely. âI know!â she said. âA lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, itâs still part of the sentence, so itâs wrong to capitalise it.â
She reblogged the post again, because she had recently read far too many potentially enjoyable stories marred by poor dialogue punctuation.
Iâve only seen this post in screenshots till now..
NOICE. Canât wait to use this
âThere are two more ways"âshe pointed to the blackboardââto punctuate interruptions. One is with the em dashes outside the quotations marks to indicate continuous speech. The action occurs at the same time as speech. The otherââ she sipped from a glass of water ââis em dashes within the quotation marks to indicate interrupted speech.â
Thank you, because having more than one way to interrupt dialogue is not confusing at all lol (Iâve only seen em dashes inside quotations, the other way hurts my brainâI prefer commas).

























