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As long as there have been writers, there have been people getting confused over the rules of how you format dialogue, and why the rules of dialogue are so weird and specific and different from the way we normally format and use punctuation. And I think part of the problem is that people tend to learn these rules from prescriptive sources ("you do X and that's just how it is") that don't really explain the reason why the rules work they way they do.
Modern grammarians prefer taking descriptive approaches to grammar: understanding that grammar rules most often develop organically within language groups and dialects, to maximize the ability to communicate clearly and without misunderstanding. This approach, in my mind, is a lot better for teaching weird and specific grammar rules than just looking up a style guide. If you as a writer understand why specific grammar rules work the way they do, you have the resources to think critically about how they interact in all the weird edge cases you stumble onto in your work.
Now, I do want to note some limits of my grammatical analysis: this post focuses primarily on English, with a background in US and UK writing traditions in specific. I'll try to be very specific with my claims on grammar here, but there's a chance I do miss something. I invite anyone to discuss in reblogs or comments if they feel I've said something inaccurate or that requires further clarification. This is a long post because I want to start with the fundamentals, but if you're at all interested in understanding why dialogue is Like That, this post may help:
The fundamentals of any language's grammar can be confusing, even if (or especially if!) you're a native speaker of the language. That's because we tend to use these rules without even thinking about them, internalizing them without consciously understanding how they operate. So please don't feel discouraged if any of this information is new to you--that's why this post is starting here, with a rundown of the very basics of how languages in general (and English in specific) work.
Part I: The Fundamentals
When you're trying to communicate a thought, one of the simplest sentence structures out there is subject-verb-object: this is grammar terminology for the case that 'something is doing something to something else'. Take the following English sentence:
I threw the ball.
In this statement, "I" am the subject, the entity performing an action. "Threw" is the verb, the action that is being done. And "the ball" is the object, the entity the action is being performed on. Together, they form a very straightforward and simple thought: I threw the ball. This framework is so common among natural languages that one high-level way linguists sort different languages is by how the categories of that framework are marked in its text.
One such method is order. English is what grammarians call an SVO language--it almost invariably orders these word-types by going subject-verb-object. Other languages may be SOV, OSV, OVS, but most languages do have a default ordering. For example Latin (which I took in school) is SOV (subject-object-verb). If I translated that English sentence into Latin, I could render it as:
Ego pilam ieci.
Here, "ego" is the subject, "pilam" the object, and "ieci" the verb. Now, Latin also does some other things to mark its subjects, objects, and verbs. It has specific endings for nouns depending on whether they're subjects or objects, which means that order can be more of a suggestion than a strict rule. Latin often did adhere to SOV order anyways, but some texts like poetry took a certain artistic license. It was therefore unusual--but not strictly ungrammatical--to order the words something like:
Pilam ieci ego.
A Latin reader would be able to understand that while the ordering is unusual, "ego" is nominative and therefore the subject, while "pilam" uses the accusative ending and is the object. But English, notably, lacks this kind of explicit word-type marking. It means I can't do the same sort of shenanigans in English. If I tell someone:
The ball threw I.
That's an ungrammatical sentence, and not likely to be understood by a native English speaker as a case where *I* am throwing *the ball*. There are very few words in English (pronouns, really) which change based on whether they're the subject or object. This means that, unlike in other language, the order of English does all the heavy lifting when it comes to communicating subject and object assignments to a listen. There are very few exceptions to SVO order in English.
Part II: Those Very Few Exceptions
Before we get into dialogue, I want to discuss a few cases where you can, technically, trick English SVO order. I think it's helpful to understand the context that English does have exceptions, but those exceptions either 1) serve very specific grammatical functions, or 2) are not actually exceptions, just weird edge cases that look like them.
One way you can fudge SVO in English is through a process called topicalization. Topicalization is a rhetorical device where the most semantically-important element of the sentence (the "topic") is moved to the very front of a sentence regardless of its usual word order. This device is actually used a lot unconsciously in English speech, but in text it appears most often in deliberately poetic prose and generally has an archaic feel to it. (It's also how Yoda-speak works. It's intelligible, but used for Yoda Star Wars specifically because it feels *off* compared to normal English.) So An example of topicalization that messes with SVO order might be:
The ball, I threw. The bases, I ran. A home run, I scored.
(Ignore the fact that the pitcher is not the one running the bases in baseball. I locked myself in to 'throwing' as an example and I needed more sentences to emphasize the point.)
These sentences *are* grammatical, even though they use OSV order! But notice how I need specific punctuation now? Topicalization in written English requires this comma as a cue, so that readers can understand that the object has been moved as part of this device.
Another "exception" might look something like this:
The ball I threw had broken through the window.
If you look at the first part of that sentence, it appears as if we've broken SVO--that's the object, subject, and then verb right there! But the thing about this example is, it's not *actually* a rearranging of "I threw the ball". This is a sentence with a main clause and a relative clause, which happen to fit together in such a way as to seem like an OSV version of "I threw the ball". The sentence can better be understood through the following notation:
The ball [that] I threw [theta] had broken through the window.
This better shows the main clause and the relative clause. The main clause is:
The ball had broken through the window.
"The ball" appears first because it's actually the *subject* of this sentence.
While:
[That] I threw [theta]
Is a relative clause which complements (i.e. adds more description to) "the ball". Relative clauses are a case where a complementizer pronoun ("that") can take the place of pretty much any noun in a relative clause--however, it always goes at the beginning. That [theta] notation above is a way that grammarians indicate a standard part of typical sentence order had been dropped (or it might be phi? I don't fully remember at this point). So here, "that" is referring to the object being thrown, and is linked to "the ball" by its position in the sentence. So it creates the illusion of OSV sentence order, when actually this is an SOV sentence with a relative clause inside that is *also* SOV.
And I hope you see how hard it is to explain grammar, and why some people will just skip to stating a rule and say that's just how it is.
Part III: Dialogue
Okay, so what is dialogue, grammatically? There's a decent amount of debate on this. But I personally think it makes the most sense to understand dialogue as the object of the speech verb. I'll be using that framework through the rest of this example to show why dialogue works the way it does in English.
So assume we're dealing with subjects, verbs, and objects. We know what happens when I throw a ball. But what happens, grammatically, here?
He said I threw the ball.
Well, that's actually also SVO order. "He" is the subject, "said" the verb, and "I threw the ball" is the object that he said (it's a type of subordinate clause--I'm skipping the part where we look at "he said that I threw the ball" because it's kind of going the long way around to the point that this clause serves as the object of a *different* clause). And that makes sense, because the entire statement is the thing that he is saying. Now consider:
I threw the ball, he said.
Remember topicalization? We can move something that's considered more important to the front of the sentence. But it is now a little bit confusing, yeah? Because when we use words like "I", it becomes ambiguous whether or not "I" refers to me, the speaker of the narrative, or this new guy. It's technically grammatical, but we're not likely to use this type of topicalization for such an ambiguous sentence. If only there was some way to clearly delineate how the statement being said relates to the rest of the text...
Enter quotation marks.
Now, I want to be clear. I'm not saying this is the Literal Historical Origin of quotation marks, to resolve this type of ambiguity. It probably happened to resolve something like this, but I'm not well-versed enough in ancient grammar to know who invented the quotation mark and why. Do not take my speculation as fact.
However, it is clear what the utility of the quotation marks is. If we force the statement inside quotation marks, we're building a reference space for it relative to the text as a whole. That way, we know that in:
He said, "I threw the ball."
"he" and "I" are referring to the same person. But in:
He said, "Luke threw the ball."
we've now forced the statement to specify in order to remain internally consistent. And that's true regardless of where in the sentence we stick it. Both sentences above are SVO, but this:
"I threw the ball," he said.
is now OSV. The dialogue object represents a unique case in English grammar, where (because of the quotation marks?) the object can float around the sentence in the same way Latin can take poetic license. That's not even the only unique thing about dialogue objects. For certain subjects, you can even use OVS order, something that's very rare with other English verbs.
"I threw the ball," said Luke.
Still grammatical, even with the subject stashed at the end of the clause. You can even form a complete sentence with only the dialogue object.
"I threw the ball."
That is grammatically complete--you are allowed to drop both the subject and verb frequently when it comes to English dialogue. This shows how "said" and similar verbs about communication function as a kind of default action. It's common and expected enough that we can signal the implied presence of the verb through other cues like quotation marks.
But remember above, with the Latin? Latin and languages like it can get away with loose word order only because of the strict markers applied to nouns and verbs. Without marking the grammatical properties of dialogue, we suddenly become unable to use dialogue as this floating object disconnected from the text. Therefore, we developed strict rules for how to signal dialogue and integrate it with a text.
Part IV: Okay, But Why These Rules?
I'm not going to say none of these rules are arbitrary, because some of them are weird. But if you write in US or UK English (I cannot speak to a lot of other dialects, and I know many different regions have *significantly* different dialogue formatting rules) the rules you're probably most familiar with probably come from that post with all the examples in quotation format. I'll do something similar here:
"You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks," she said.
They added, "But dialogue at the end of a sentence ends with a period inside those same quotations."
"Don't forget that you need a comma after the 'said' verb if dialogue directly follows it. But not if the verb is already being used for different dialogue!" he noted. "And aren't there special kinds of sentence stops that work no matter where in the sentence the dialogue is?"
Even with the above, things can get complicated. But the best way I can describe it for authors is: language is recursive. You can fit an entire clause inside of other clauses, and each clause has to be grammatical relative to itself. This means you should think of each line involving dialogue as having two grammatical layers.
In the first, all sentences with transitive verbs need a S, V, and O somewhere (even if that 'where' is imaginary. So you can think of the above passage as functioning, grammatically, as so:
[Object], she said. They added, [object]. [object], he noted. (He said,) [object].
There's one funny rule, which is that a comma should separate the object from the subject/verb when the verb is a dialogue tag and the object is in quotation marks. When the verb is dropped, so is the extra comma.
Then you think of the clauses that act as the objects (dialogue, specifically, consists of clauses). They have to be grammatical, relative to themselves. Note that here, 'grammatical' doesn't mean all of your characters speak with perfect English--it means that you need to have sentence breaks and some reasonable standard of punctuation, even in dialogue. Remember that a single dialogue "object" can be multiple sentences. You need them to exhibit consistent grammar on their own terms. The following:
You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks
is not grammatical, because it lacks punctuation to serve as a sentence stop.
You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks.
is now grammatical. Once again, I'm not a grammar history buff so this is purely speculation, but I think somewhere down the line we realized that our one funny rule was making things really awkward. "This is a random quote.", they said. looks ridiculous. A lot of language refinement is about simplification, and that mess is certainly not simple. So the comma migrated *inside* the quotation marks to replace the period that was previously there.
Note that this replacement only works on periods--which serve as the "default" sentence stop. When the sentence stop is instead an exclamation mark, a question mark, or a hyphen, that information is worth preserving, so it overrides the comma. Likewise, we drop the period that should be on the outside of the quotation marks at the end because the sentence inside the quotes already has a sentence stop.
Conclusion?
There are a lot more dialogue punctuation rules, of course, and a lot more quotation mark rules (not the same thing), so if anyone has follow-up questions on my take of Best Quotation Mark Formatting, feel free to hit me up. What I hoped to make clear with this post was not just "what are the rules", but "why are the rules". Because that way you can start approaching weirder formatting questions with a critical understanding of how the underlying grammar of the sentence is meant to operate. Which punctuation standard more clearly serves the needs of a reader? Which better reflects the underlying conceptual structure behind the grammar? And which do you prioritize in a given moment?
I think this approach is more valuable than just a long list of rules. It helps you to think about grammar as a thing which enhances meaning, which allows writers to work in a more holistic way--you're not fighting your own formatting to make the story understood. You're using the formatting as a layer of understanding. Thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful.
you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads
you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride
these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.
final thought - breaking the pride tradition and more than likely won't make a new piece. the top one from TDOV is all i'm making this year. i have my focus on other projects currently and i don't want to force a poster design. these came from a specific head space and my current head space is Very Tired lmao so i wanna work on other things. đ
The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.
The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.
Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.
Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.
The Vessel switches off their location-transmission devices, thereby making themselves a HAZARD TO MARITIME NAVIGATION, in order to ENGAGE IN ILLEGAL ACTS.
The Vessel is FRAUDULENTLY DISPLAYING a national flag that is NOT OF THEIR REGISTERED PORT OF ORIGIN.
The Vessel is otherwise engaged in ACTS THAT VIOLATE SOLEMN MARITIME LAW, and may face fines and prosecution in admiralty court for their offense in their port of origin or nation in which the offense was registered.
Actually I regret to inform you some ships ARE illegal. Sailing a ship you know to not be seaworthy may constitute insurance fraud, which is very illegal.
Today instead of a problematic ship, we present you the guidelines on how to avoid the most common mistakes that result in a ship becoming problematic.
âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
So I just simultaneously did, and possibly didn't lose my job today :)
Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.
So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.
But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.
It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?
So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:
Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.
And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. đ.
So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".
So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.
I don't know what else to say aside from I've been laughing all day and I'm gonna have a hell of a time explaining Schrodinger's Unemployment to the benefits office.
Update that is not an update because I'm basically certain this isn't what actually happened:
My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.
Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.
Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.
Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).
Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues
(also shout out to the person who proposed Carmen Sandiego)
According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.
Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.
For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.
So now I'm officially out of a job. Because my workplace was literally stolen in the night.
Actually fuck it let's share some photos cause I wouldn't be inclined to believe this myself. It's not like anyone can stalk me at my job now and I'm not gonna have to see any coworkers that might find my tumblr.
Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life
Aaand a close-up:
The last remains of a once Very Much Solid And Immobile Workplace
I want all animals to become sapient enough to produce art specifically because I want to see what sort of sex homunculus caricature each species would create if given the ability to draw
Like we've already got the anime waifu with the needle-waist and watermelon-bazonkas and borzoi-legs and bug-eyes. Now show me a fucked-up stupid beetle as drawn by a horny beetle. I want to see what a cartoonishly sexy lion looks like according to lions. I want to see the most ridiculous drawing of a peahen that would have the peacocks squaring up by the fountain.
You can actually see the bug version in some orchids. The orchid takes the bug's idea of "sexy" and makes a flower that attracts the males better than the actual female.
(Picture from the paper "Pollinators as Isolation Mechanisms: Field Observations and Field Experiments regarding specificity of pollinator attraction in the genus Ophrys" by Paulus (2018))
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
stormborns
germansingergirl
