Pfffft this site felt the need to show me this when I opened up my dashboard:
[Image ID: a clipped image of a tumblr dashboard, the “activity” lightning bolt icon has a notification that simply reads “0″. End ID]
Tumblr’s really out here like
[Image ID: meme from Fairly OddParents where the father is showing off an empty trophy pedestal in the first panel. The “0 notifications” activity icon has been placed on the pedestal. Text reads “THIS IS WHERE WE’D PUT YOUR BLOG’S ACTIVITY”. In the second panel, the father is angry and the text reads “IF IT HAD ANY”. End ID]
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.
Alright time to pull out my conspiracy board. City Council of Darkness takes place in the same universe as The Unsleeping City and you cannot change my mind on that.
So a lot of my "fandom" posts on this blog are pretty positive because, you know, I like talking about things that I like. But I'm not immune to the hater impulse, and part of trying to read regularly, more widely, and picking books I haven't heard about before means that sometimes I find a real gem (of a terrible book). One in particular (very obscure, I promise I'm not subtweeting any fandom here on Tumblr) was absolutely, genuinely torturous to read--possibly the worst book I have read, ever--but so goddamn *fun* to talk about. It has everything. It's a mystery where no one, including the police, does any investigating. It's a thriller where critical meetings are missed, rescheduled, and generally taken at glacial pace because it's only a serial killer, how important could it be? The narrative has a smug tone of enlightened centrism while still managing to hit just about every specific subcategory of bigotry. The protagonist does not know how emails work in the year 2015. It has an eighty-five page villain monologue. Bernie Sanders cameos in it. What more could you want (to hate)?
Alright time to pull out my conspiracy board. City Council of Darkness takes place in the same universe as The Unsleeping City and you cannot change my mind on that.
Finally read Platform Decay. Love how the entirety of the plot can be effectively summed up as Murderbot being forced to navigate the fallout of a single messy breakup. The Greater Corporation Rim Polycule is in shambles.
Happy 3rd anniversary to the game that took over my brain! In honor of the occasion, I've got a special video for you guys today, in which I go over the scenes I missed in my initial playthrough. Amarantus 100% completion, now finally available on the channel:
Finally, after nearly 2 years, I'm back to finish what I started.(Side note: I'm putting this before the art streams in the playlist, but it
Real thing that changed how i write: I started asking "what does this character think is wrong with them" and separately "what is actually wrong with them." Those two things are almost never the same. She thinks she's too much. She's actually terrified of being too little. He thinks he's bad at commitment. He's actually just never met someone he trusted enough. The gap between their diagnosis of themselves and the real thing, that's your character arc right there. you don't have to explain it. just write both.
Whatever else one can say about Tolkien, deciding to resolve accidentally using the same elf name twice by going "actually, it's the same guy; yeah, he just walked back to Middle-Earth from the afterlife – in fact, all elves can technically do that, but he's the only one who did" was kind of a move.
So I've run into an AI art bro who had a specific and...we'll call it 'interesting' take on why using AI to help one write is fine and normal and what artists across time would have done. I'm not going to link or screenshot it here, because I want to focus on one specific assertion: that Michelangelo used assistants to help him create his artwork. Therefore, Michelangelo would have used AI in his art had he access to it.
I find a number of flaws with this argument (modern "AI" would be impossible to create without work like Michelangelo's to train off of) but the actual point about the assistants proves, I think, the exact opposite of what this AI bro intended. So let's talk about that (big long essay below):
To start, is this assertion even true? I'm not an art history buff. I welcome those with expertise on the subject to chime in, but it sounds like the question of if Michelangelo has assistants helping him with his art is actually the subject of some debate, historically. There are sources I have found who say he hired assistants for at least the first year of work on the Sistine Chapel, for example. Others, including a history by Giorgio Vasari written a few decades after the Chapel was painted, claim otherwise. The way Vasari writes it, Michelangelo had hired assistants specifically to paint the fresco, but alleges that he realized the assistants' work was "very far from what he desired". Quote: "He resolved one morning to throw to the ground everything they had done...[and]...made arrangements to paint the whole work by himself, carried it well on the way to completion with the utmost solitude, labor, and study."
Now, Vasari is not entirely trusted as a source by historians? He reports a lots of fact which can be verified, but there have been plenty of errors found in his work. And I think that, as a person who would be alive when people were still calling Michelangelo "The Divine One~" for his artistic capabilities. The hype was real, and it's entirely possible that Vasari is unconsciously filtering Michelangelo's life through this genius narrative, the "great man" theory. Of course his assistants didn't do anything important. Michelangelo's the important one, the auteur, his art springs from him and him alone. I personally have some skepticism about this idea, but logically there are only two possibilities in play: 1) Vasari is correct and Michelangelo did the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling all by himself, and 2) Vasari is exaggerating a bit and the assistants did contribute to the art itself.
I shouldn't need to explain that option 1 is really bad for the AI art bros, right? The whole thing is a specific kind of argument to authority--if *Michelangelo*, one of the greatest sculptor/painters of all time, used tools like the assistance of other artists to create his greatest masterpieces, it must be okay for "AI artists" to do the same today. But if Vasari is right, that entire narrative is backwards. What actually happened is that Michelangelo considered using an artistic shortcut because he lacked a specific skill (he was primarily a sculptor, and had limited experience with frescoes in specific). But he realized that the shortcut could not replicate his vision for the art, so instead he worked hard to develop the skill he'd been lacking. The work of art we consider today to be a masterpiece is such *because* he chose not to use these types of artistic shortcuts. From this story I think we can conclude if Michelangelo had access to AI, he'd try it, decide it wasn't helping, and throw its work out completely. Not a win for team AI.
Now, I have mentioned I don't personally buy that the assistants did nothing on the Sistine Chapel. There is, as mentioned, some debate. I have found sources that argue the assistants were employed for at least the first year of the project. I've seen a claim (secondhand) that they may have done "less" important work like scalloping edges or some "decorative figures" in the background. A modern biographer, Dr. William Wallace says that (emphasis mine), "when [Michelangelo] says he painted it all by himself, that’s his way of celebrating the fact that really he did. He directed the entire operation and painted the most important figures." And that's an interesting way to phrase that, right? Because if he did paint "the most important figures", that does support the idea that other artists painted other figures. So he didn't really do it all by himself, did he? We just ignore those other contributions in favor of, well--Michelangelo the Divine.
Option 2 is definitely the more appealing one for the AI art bros, which is why the argument started with "Michelangelo used assistants, which is exactly the same as AI today". The argument this person thinks he's making is: "Michelangelo is considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time, and he also outsourced boring artistic work like repetitive flourishes and background characters to external tools (people). Therefore, if I outsource boring artistic work to AI, I am also qualified to be considered one of the greatest artists of all time."
That's not the argument I hear, though. What *I* hear, is this: "There are people who helped contribute artistically to what is considered one of the greatest pieces of art of all time, and we do not consider their names to be worth learning." Look, I understand why Michelangelo receives the bulk of the praise for the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. Even with all the debate, it is likely that Michelangelo did the majority of the painting, along with the high-level creative planning that made the whole thing possible. But surely the assistants merit some consideration? This is a very common and long-running issue in art--we like so much the idea of The Auteur, the single visionary who is solely responsible for the entire work, that we let the individuals applying their creative skills in less glamorous ways fall by the wayside. It happens in video games (which have a long history of failing to credit developers, artists, and more, and which still like to frame single "creators" as being responsible for an entire game), it happens in film (which highlights directors, though film does have an industry standard of meticulous credits for all the workers who made the final product possible), and it happens in fine art. We know Michelangelo so well we refer to him by first name only. I have to hunt to learn who his assistants even were.
Sources name his original four fresco assistants as Bastiano da Sangallo, Giuliano Bugiardini, Agnolo di Donnino, and Jacopo del Tedesco, all from Florence. I've also found attribution to Pietro Rosselli, a plasterer who prepared the ceiling for the new fresco and Pietro Urbano, another sculptor involved. I see a source saying that Bastiano, Giuliano, and Agnolo left the project at some point to be replaced by Giovanni Trignoli and Bernardino Zacchetti from Northern Italy. Their collective involvement is only mentioned in corrections of misconceptions of history. They're footnotes in the narrative of "the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo".
And this point *is* something that ties very heavily into AI, and the question of its use in art--but not in the way the AI art bros want. Because AI is designed to do exactly this process, to erase the contributions of "lesser" artists in favor of a narrative where great men make great art ~all by themselves~. Other artists make art, which gets fed into the churn of AI training data, which provides no proper credits for which artists' work informed the feature weights which spat out the results of a given prompt. And the AI itself, of course, isn't going to get mad at you for not crediting it as a co-creator. Its job is *not to do that*. Its job is to tell *you* that you did all the work by yourself...even when, like Michelangelo, you didn't.
I wonder if I was being too snarky when I called the (human) people who assisted Michelangelo his "external tools [for art]", but literally that's the equivalence that was made by the AI bro at the start of this argument. Assistants whose names are almost lost to history are the same type of tool as an AI whose modus operandi is using the work of individual artists without compensation or citation. And not just artists--the entire industry of AI is built off of the exploitation of real human people worldwide in such large numbers they are effectively nameless. This exploitation is done both for resources (processing units require rare metals, which are often mined under abhorrent conditions and at great danger to the miners) and for mental labor (AI companies are right now paying desperate workers worldwide pittances to perform mentally and emotionally strenuous annotation work for their billions-large datasets). This problem is not new to "AI", it's been endemic in the tech field for a very long time. But I find it especially chilling the way companies elide the massive amounts of (human) labor behind their product to investors, stockholders, and their consumer audience. Their business model is removing recognition for the (human) people actually doing the work, in favor of a narrative where the tool is a neutral mechanical assisting force which allows the consumer to be an auteur who produces 100% of the product themself. It's selling a narrative, not a tool.
Using AI in your art does not make you Michelangelo. It makes you think you're Michelangelo. And not even real Michelangelo, the guy who actually taught himself how to fresco despite being a sculptor because he was annoyed that his vision wasn't coming out right. Michelangelo ~The Divine, the fictional man who produced the fresco entirely by himself on his back for four years, and teeeeeeeechnically he had a lot of help but not important help, not the kind of help that needs to be mentioned in history books--just the kind we bring up when we want to argue that our favorite art guy would have used AI if he'd had it. It's an illusion. You're being sold an illusion. And it's one that I personally, am sick of.
Honestly the fact that bookshelves are increasing the *extraversion* score should be the only thing anyone needs to see to know how unserious the AI analysis is. Can we introverts not have one thing??
An aspiring one. I'm in the middle of redrafting my manuscript now, and then we'll see how the publication process goes. So that's potentially a long way out. You can find more information about my book on this blog by searching "my writing", "original fiction", or "The Dark Arts and Crafts" (the current series title).
