The Grammar Wench's Dialogue Demo
Author: Jody Wallace
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: October 2003

You already know the basics of punctuating dialogue, or I hope you do. Put quotation marks around the words actually spoken. Make sure it’s clear who’s speaking. Start a new paragraph each time a new person speaks. 

“Blah, blah, blah,” said the Grammar Wench. “Comma, comma, comma chameleon.”

“I know that already. When are you going to get to the good stuff?” the reader asked.

And so on.

You’ll notice that punctuation is inside the quotation marks — the comma after that last blah, the period after chameleon, the question mark after stuff. The quotation marks are double apostrophes, if you will, and if you quote something inside them, you use a single mark. This follows the conventions of American printers, as opposed to British. This has such few exceptions I’m not going into any of them here.

Not difficult, no indeedy. The grey areas in punctuating dialogue are so pale as to be imperceptible to most eyes, not like those dratted compound predicates I tackled a few articles back. This would be an open and shut case if it weren’t for a few tricky areas. We’re not talking lie/lay or split infinitive tricky, but tricky enough that old dogs (or young whippersnapper dogs who think they know everything) might have trouble with it.

One, if your speaker gets cut off, you still need punctuation at the end of his or her speech inside the quotation marks. That punctuation should be a dash, not an ellipsis, as I commonly see. Speechus interruptus is an abrupt thing, not a dwindling.

“You call that good–” the reader began.

“Shut your cake hole. I’m just getting warmed up,” the Grammar Wench said.

Incidentally, the Chicago Manual of Style likes a comma after the dash when there’s a speech tag afterwards, though just a dash if it’s at the end of a sentence. I’ve seen it both ways in reputable printed material. 

Since I know you love it, your darling, dotty ellipsis can be used when the speaker’s words flutter off like a stack of student essays in a spring breeze.

“I guess....” said the reader with a sigh.

Refer to any Barbara Cartland novel on how to overuse ellipsis points in dialogue. The grand old gal made a very meaningful mark on the field of romance fiction, but imitating her love for the dots isn’t a form of flattery I recommend. When it’s four dots, like above, that means there is pause at the end of a complete sentence. The first dot is the period; the next three are the ellipsis points. Use only three dots when your speaker’s words don’t form a whole sentence, ie:

“Don’t just guess when you can...” The Grammar Wench’s voice trailed off when her reader wandered away in search of an article about writing sex scenes.

Again, the Chicago Manual likes a comma after the ellipsis if the dialogue is followed by a tag, as in the first example. So, that’s kind of grey. Grey like athletic socks after your son does his own laundry for the first time at college. And now that I’ve bleached out the differences between dashes and dots for you, let’s move on.

The term “speech tag” is commonly used to refer to the “he said/she said” part of dialogue, the part that tags the identity of the speaker. Your punctuation may shift if you choose to use speech tags with your dialogue or what Browne and King, in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, call a “beat”. Beats are “little bits of action interspersed through a scene, such as a character walking to a window or removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes — the literary equivalent of what is known in the theater as stage business” (102).

First, the difference:

Tag: “You’re it,” GW said.

Beat: “No, I’m not. You missed me! Nyaa nyaa!” The reader stuck out her tongue in a nasty fashion.

When you use a beat, it’s a new sentence. So your dialogue ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point, and the next phrase starts a new sentence, complete with capital letter. I myself still prefer two spaces between sentences as well. You do not write your sentence like this:

“No thanks, I use toilet paper,” the Grammar Wench stuck her thumbs in her ears and waggled her fingers.

Well, you’re quite welcome to stick your thumbs in your ears and waggle your fingers — in fact, I recommend it on certain occasions — but please don’t treat a beat like a tag when punctuating dialogue.

Beats can actually masquerade as tags in a sneaky way. You’ve probably all heard by now that “said bookisms”, or synonyms for the word said, are evil. (Here’s a fun article about them: http://writingcraft.deepmagic.net/mlerwill001.html.) The current fashion recommends that one avoid them, even though they seem, to the writer, to be more accurate or colorful. Words like snarled, shouted, interjected, questioned, retorted, complained, and so on should be used in extreme moderation as speech tags. The theory behind this is that readers gloss over repeated occurrences of “said” and don’t equate it with a limited vocabulary.

Why should one do this? Because if you use a lot of synonyms for said, you’ll set off the dreaded amateur alarm in an editor’s head. Moreover, a lot of those words aren’t actually equivalent to said. When they aren’t, it turns your speech tag into a beat, and probably a mispunctuated beat at that.

“The term ‘saidbook’ comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple prose synonyms for the word ‘said,’ which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny advertisements in American pulp magazines of the pre-WWII era,” the Grammar Wench yawned.

I am quite the talker, even when tired, but I cannot yawn words. And despite what your 10-year-old son insists, one cannot belch words either, although I have to say, if you were writing dialogue in which the words were belched, I personally think the ban on said bookisms should be temporarily lifted. Regardless, the correct way to punctuate the above sentence would be to put a period after era and capitalize “the” in front of Grammar Wench.

Another one I bet a lot of you have used, I mean, seen, is:

“Oh, I get it now!” the reader smiled.

Or

“I’m so proud of you. I was beginning to worry,” the Grammar Wench chuckled.

You can’t hurry love, and you can’t smile words. You can smile or chuckle while you say words (the reader said with a smile), but you can’t smile them. You definitely can’t shrug words. I see that one a lot. If you tire of writing “he said, she said” over and over, replace more of your tags with beats. Properly punctuated, of course.

The last thing I want to talk about is divided dialogue. Sometimes you stop the gush of words for speaker identification but find yourself forced to continue since your character just won’t shut up. If the dialogue before the interruption is the same grammatical sentence in the second part, you punctuate it differently than if it’s a brand new sentence.

“My daughter,” the Grammar Wench said, “is sitting in my lap and won’t let me type!”

“My daughter is sitting in my lap etc.” is a single sentence, so the interruption is wedged in with commas and the second half begins with a lowercase letter. An example of two different sentences:

“A likely excuse,” the reader said. “More likely, you’re sick of working and want to go read a boring grammar book or something.”

After “said”, I inserted a period, bopped ahead two spaces, and started the next bit of dialogue with a capital letter. It’s up to you to decide whether or not your separated speeches are one sentence or two. When in doubt, rewrite so that you’re no longer in doubt!

One last thing, and I’ll call it a night. Browne and King claim that one should favor “the reader said” over “said the reader” because the second version sounds like it’s from a children’s book, not an adult book. You’re on your own there, but if a lot of editors consciously or subconsciously agree, I suppose it’s worth noting.

Until next time, my comrades in commas!

Works Cited:

Browne, Renni and Dave King. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

***

If you would like to ask a grammar related question or suggest a topic, feel free to email grammarwench at mcrw.com. If your question or topic is not grammar related, you will probably still get an answer but she might use her Magic 8 ball to come up with it.

Back to main Grammar Wench Page

Love Notes, the official monthly newsletter of Music City Romance Writers, is provided to paying members free of charge. If you are an MCRW member and would like to submit an article to Love Notes, visit the main newsletter page for more information. If you would like to reprint one of these articles in your RWA chapter newsletter, please give proper credit to both the author and the original source. For any other uses, please contact the president.