Basic Dialogue Rules Everyone Should Learn
I see a lot of people making mistakes with their punctuation in dialogue, which is completely understandable! It’s hard! Hopefully this master list will help you out a bit:
Start a new paragraph when someone new speaks!
End your dialogue with a punctuation mark (, . ? !) INSIDE the speech marks, like: “Hello,” said Sarah.
Start your dialogue with a capital letter, even if the sentence begins with a dialogue tag, as in: Sarah said, “Hello.”
When an action occurs between dialogue, end the dialogue and start with a capital letter: “Hello.” She waved a hand at the customer. “How can I help?
Dialogue is super useful for giving the reader information in an interesting way, especially info about your character. It’s also a great way to start your story / chapter!
Some extra notes:
Read your dialogue out loud. This is the best way to get natural sounding dialogue!
You can use single (’ ‘) or double (” “) quotation marks for dialogue, just choose one and be consistent
Saying ‘said’ is okay! Readers normally just skip over it. If the dialogue is between two characters, you may not even need a speech verb.
