It is a mistake to leave the comma, as in the following erroneous construction: “Now where’s my eye of newt?”įor this implied attribution, you have to close the preceding dialogue. “That’s what I call a brew.” Hagrid stirred the cauldron. Sometimes, instead of explicitly attributing dialogue to a character, we have some action or event described in the same paragraph, and by that means imply who is speaking: “Not in the fire-pit, you dolt!” she said.įor exclamation marks and question marks, just pretend that they end with a comma instead. The quoted dialogue is set off by a comma after the attribution.ĭialogue attribution with exclamation or question mark: The quoted dialogue is a new sentence, so we get a capitalized first letter. Hagrid said, “Not in the fire-pit, you dolt!” The second quoted dialogue starts with a capital, since it is a new sentence.ĭialogue attribution before spoken sentences: In this case, we end the attribution with the period. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gregor said. This technique has the added effect of creating a subtle/implied pause in the speaker’s speech the pause isn’t stated, but the reader feels it.ĭialogue attribution between spoken sentences: The attribution comes in the middle of a quoted sentence, so we don’t need to capitalize the first word in the second piece of quoted dialogue, which is set off by a comma after the attribution. “And if frogs had wings,” she said, “they wouldn’t bump their ass when they hopped.” Those are the basics, so now we can look at different implementations, special cases, and how things might go wrong. This is the standard: The quoted speech ends with a comma inside the double-quotes the attribution is not capitalized unless it is a proper name each new speaker sets off a new paragraph. We’re going to go with the standard convention of double-quotes:
Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood are two authors who have gone in this direction. If you ditch punctuation, you need to be extra careful with your writing to make sure it is obvious who is speaking. Another option is to ditch punctuation entirely: Andre Alexis, for example, has used this punctuation for dialogue in his work. The em-dash for dialogue might raise eyebrows, but it is an option. For example, you can ditch the double-quotes, and instead use an initial em-dash to indicate speech: It’s worth noting that there are other options. The current convention is to use double-quotes around spoken dialogue, so this post will be primarily about how punctuation should work within this convention.
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It isn’t about how to write the content of dialogue, just how to express who is saying it. This post is all about these technical issues. Aside from actually figuring out the content of your character’s dialogue, you also need to know how to say who said what-dialogue attribution-and how to punctuate it.
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