The Brave Don't Fear the Grave

Ciao, meow~ I'm gonna try and use this old account again, so I might be reuploading old art I've done in the past. I hope to return to doing art comms again in the future, but as of now my queue is closed. Also I need to clean up my page a fair bit in terms of design and old posts, so bear with me as I do some page construction (^w^)"

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aqua

[96haiki]

8.26.2023

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techwear

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johto

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floral hisuian zoroark

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dragon horse

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seabed

[spacecolonie]

lighting studies i did the other week

[spacecolonie]

effigy

[dominiqueramseyart]

Dog days of August days 20-22

20 - Braco Italiano 21 - Cane Corso 22 - Cesky Terrier

[yorozumarugallery]

COMMISSION WORK

[yorozumarugallery]

COMMISSION WORK

[whatagrump]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[thewritinggrindstone]

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Reblog to save a writer’s life.

[jaydove-writes]

Thank you

[localcanadiancryptid22]

Oh my god thank you. No wonder grammarly keeps complaining about my punctuation when I boot my writing up into word counter

[freemtariphe]

What if dialogue tag is first, dialogue second? Does English allow for this? How is it marked then? I know it’s not common order in fiction, but I still need to know for the few cases where I need it.

[whatagrump]

English definitely allows for this, and it’s pretty common:

She said, “If the dialogue tag comes first, you should use a comma before the quotation mark and capitalize the first word of the dialogue.”

These are dialogue rules only. There are other rules that can apply when you’re quoting things the way you might in an essay. Sometimes you see this in novels as well, e.g. I try to claim that I’m “not a pedant,” but who am I kidding.

[tokyozilla]

Biridious -

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[96haiki]

7.18.2023

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koi