A technical primer denoting some rules and conventions.
For many of us, we internalise the rules of writing by reading — by sheer osmosis, we take them in, and we replicate them in our own work, often without even realising. When it comes to technical rules, though, it can be difficult to grasp them intuitively because they’re tethered to other rules of grammar we might not entirely understand, and dialogue is one of those difficult things to get.
For years, I struggled to understand a lot of dialogue rules, and subsequently stuff I’ve written as recently as two or three years ago is incredibly difficult to read because the dialogue is good, but the way it’s presented makes it confusing and hard to follow, because it doesn’t follow some basic conventions. For that reason, as I go through the rules here, I’m going to try to explain, without getting too bogged down in technical language, why the rules exist and are followed the way we follow them, because for me, part of the reason I was defensive about learning some dialogue rules, and resistant to changing how I wrote dialogue, was because I didn’t understand why certain rules existed.
Just a note before I get going — I’m Welsh and typically use double quotation marks / speech marks (“.”), but a lot of Brits will use single quotation marks (‘.’), and using one or the other is grand, typically, so long as you stick to using one consistently.
There are other ways to show dialogue, too — in French and Greek, I’ve often seen people use em-dashes or hyphens to denote dialogue at the beginning of each line ( — or -), or use angle brackets as speech marks instead (< >)— and of course, there’s script formatting too, but because I typically use quotation marks to denote dialogue, that’s what I’m going to focus on here.
Tags & Quotation Marks
“This is dialogue.”
In the above, the dialogue stands on its own, and is a full sentence within quotation marks. As it’s a full sentence, it ends with a full stop or period (.), denoting the end of the clause. Once we add a tag, though, it’s different — a tag being a piece of a sentence that denotes who is speaking or how the dialogue is presented.
Punctuation always goes inside the quote marks, never outside of them.
“This is dialogue,” he said.
Notice, in the above, that the end of the spoken sentence is denoted not by a full stop, but instead by a comma (,), because the quotation is no longer a full sentence on its own. Instead, it’s half of the full sentence, with the other half being the tag. A very common error would be to formulate the quotation and tag as two separate sentences, like so:
“This is dialogue.” He said.
Why is this an error?
Because the full stop denotes the end of a sentence, so instead of the above being a piece of dialogue in one sentence, it is instead two strangely disconnected ones. There is the dialogue itself, which makes sense on its own, but then there’s also the separate clause, which doesn’t make sense when read on its own.
He said.
When you see the above sentence on its own, it seems weird, right? He said what? What did he say?
It’s confusing.
The tag doesn’t always have to be in the same place, so you might also have formulations like,
He said, “This is dialogue.”
“This is dialogue too,” said Johannes.
In the first instance, the comma denotes that the quotation is about to begin, and in the latter, it follows the same format as the first example, but with the verb instead of the pronoun.
You might also want to put the tag in the middle of a sentence, and you’d use commas to show that too, like so:
“Dialogue can be difficult,” he said, “but it gets easier with practice.”
For the first section of the sentence, we use a comma to show where we’re ceding to the tag, and then another comma at the end of the tag shows where we’re going back into dialogue. The tag interrupts the sentence, which would still make sense on its own if you took the tag out of the middle, but in this case, the comma doesn’t denote the end of a sentence, but the end of that clause, which you might think of as the natural pause in the sentence.
This can be a good way to show the natural pause in a sentence, such as where a character is taking a breath or stopping for a moment for dramatic effect. To make sure you’re putting it in the right place, it can be helpful to read the quotation out loud, take a big breath where the tag interrupts, and then keep reading, and sort of listen to see how it sounds.
“Dialogue,” he said, “can be difficult.”
“You know what’s difficult?” he asked. “Dialogue!” came the immediate answer. “But it gets easier with practice.”
“Dialogue…” he began, before trailing slowly off. “It is my enemy.”
It’s important to note that when using different punctuation that would ordinarily show the end of the sentence, such, if you add a tag to it like the latter two examples above, you can treat them in the same way you would a comma.
Even though I know this is technically correct, though, I do genuinely struggle with it myself at times, because I stare at it like, “Oh, that doesn’t look quite right,” and then I change up the dialogue to avoid using a tag, and instead use description:
“Dialogue…” Sighing, he shook his head. “It’s the bane of my life.”
“You know what’s difficult?” He paused, dragging his knuckles thoughtfully over the stubble on his chin. “Well, writing in general. But dialogue particularly.”
It’s important to remember that the way that we use tags and in-line description can affect the pacing of what we’ve written.
If you have a conversation between two people, you can have a lot of dialogue passing between two people with very few or no tags at all, and because the reader isn’t slowed down, so to speak, by the tags, it can help it feel like the pace is very fast.
In contrast, if you want to put across that dialogue is very leisurely and slow, or like the mood is quite quiet, with little conversation, you can put in tags and a lot of complicated description; you can also withhold tags entirely to show a lot of voices overlapping, or to show that your protagonist doesn’t know the speakers they can hear.
Line-by-Line
One of the first rules we learn about writing is when to start a new paragraph, a new line.
We start a new paragraph when we change settings, when we move into a different room, when the topic changes, and so on: to start a new paragraph is to show a transition from one element to the next.
Therefore, we should always start a new paragraph for each new speaker in a conversation, or to show the transition between one current speaker to the next one, like so:
“I’m not sleeping much as of late,” he muttered, staring into the depths of his coffee cop.
She glanced at him. “Of late?” she repeated dryly. “I don’t think anyone’s sleeping much.”
What you can also note from the above that any description of each speaker, if it’s in its own sentence, should be on the same line as the speaker’s dialogue.
I really struggled to get my hang around this for a while, because I thought, “Oh, you start a new line for each line of dialogue,” and I didn’t realise that it’s the new person, not the actual speech.
When the camera moves in the text, so to speak, that’s when the paragraph change comes, not necessarily when new words are spoken.
“You know that screaming from last night?” he asked conversationally, and she looked at him quizzically. He pointed at the ceiling.
“Oh, right,” she muttered, glancing up. “Yeah, vaguely, but I was half asleep. What about it?”
He grinned.
She huffed out a laugh, putting one hand on her hip. “What?”
“He says it was his dog.”
Snorting, she shook her head, and said, “That was not his dog.”
You can use em-dashes to show interruptions of dialogue, like so:
“Would you for once listen to me and — ”
“What makes you think I’m not listening?”
“ — be quiet?”
The em-dash shows that the dialogue is clipped, and then shows where the dialogue starts back up again, acting as a bridge. Notice how in the latter instance, it’s still lower-case, because it’s a continuation of a sentence, not a new sentence on its own.
The em-dash is a more urgent way to show this sort of interruption — you could also use an ellipsis (…), which can be a great way to show that the speaker is more slow in their speech, and/or that they’re not addressing the interrupter directly, especially to show multiple interactions. An ellipsis will be great, for example, to show where someone is speaking while someone else is lecturing, or while the TV or radio is blaring, like so:
“… can be seen in the development of beauty standards typical of the epoch, such as pale, glowing skin…”
“Are you listening to me?”
“… bright red lips and cheeks…”
“No, I’m listening to the lecture.”
“… heavily lidded eyes…”
“You’re not bored by this?”
“… and a very slim physique. Tuberculosis — ”
“No, shut up!”
“Mr Gant, Mr Lin, I do apologise. Is my lecture interrupting your conversation?”
Quotations Within Quotations
To show a quotation within speech, you can use single quotation marks within the double quotation marks — or, if you use single quotation marks as your default, you can do it the other way around.
Like so:
“And he says, ‘Oh, well, uh, I’ve never seen this before,’ and I says, ‘What the Hell are you talking about? You think I’m that stupid?’ and he just stares at me with his mouth open like a goddamn fish, like no one ever caught him in the act before!”
This isn’t the only way to show a quotation within speech, though — you could use italics, or just use dialogue banked within commas, or you can have the quote stand alone as a segment of dialogue with the tag or description showing it’s an impression, or spoken with the gravity one would expect of a quote.
It honestly depends on your style, and what works for you in the text.
You might not even want to denote a quotation — if you have your protagonist not recognising that someone uses quotation constantly in their speech, for example, it would behoove you not to use quotation marks, because when we craft our dialogue, it help show our POV or our narrative view just like any other element in our writing.
Closing Remarks
The above is by no means a comprehensive list of every potential dialogue rule or convention, but more of a general list of the most common mistakes I see in crafting dialogue, and especially a lot of mistakes I’ve made myself.
I really love writing dialogue, especially when thinking about crafting different voices for each new character, and sometimes I think it can feel like the rules around writing dialogue are something that’s holding one back, but once we really understand these rules, we can use them to elevate our dialogue and our narrative, and they can be a tool we use just like anything else, a very effective one.
I hope this is helpful for anyone who struggles with dialogue rules!
Thanks for reading! I have books out, and I’m also on Twitter.
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