![]() A colon may be used here, though that tends to seem formal and old-fashioned. In the same way, a dialogue tag coming before the dialogue should be followed by a comma. “You will stay here, until –“ he began, as the door burst open. “If you disobey me.” he said, leaving the implied threat unspoken. “Why don’t you stay where you are?” he asked. It should definitely not end with a full-stop. Bill Gates is trying to sabotage your writing.Ī piece of dialogue that’s followed by a dialogue tag should finish with a comma, as in the examples above, unless it needs to have a question-mark, exclamation-mark, an ellipsis or a dash, to indicate broken-off speech. Some word-processing software tries to “correct” a lower-case letter to a capital when the dialogue finishes with a question-mark, exclamation-mark or an ellipsis (row of dots), but this is incorrect. This is because the dialogue and the tag form a single sentence – he is the subject, said is the verb and the dialogue itself is the object. The word until should therefore not have a capital.Ī dialogue tag should never start with a capital, unless of course the first word is a name or I. The actual sentence spoken is You will stay where you are until I’ve finished with you. “You will stay where you are,” he said, “until I’ve finished with you.” The word You is the first word of the sentence actually spoken, and so has a capital. The best guideline for the use of capitals is to consider what position in the sentence as spoken the word has. One of the most common errors with dialogue is the use of punctuation and capitals. “I’m going to restore the world to how it used to be, and then we’ll deal with the Dark Lord.” “This has gone far enough,” said the wizard. I’m going to restore the world to how it used to be, and then we’ll deal with the Dark Lord,” said the wizard.” Secondly, it can create long blocks of speech, whereas placing the tag in the middle can break this up and give the speech more dynamics. Firstly, the reader has to wait till the end of the paragraph to find out who’s speaking and how they’re saying the words. There’s nothing actually wrong with always putting it at the end, but this can have two disadvantages, especially with a long paragraph of speech. The position of the tag is a matter of taste. “I’m going on ahead,” he said, “and you can follow me.” “I’m going on ahead, and you can follow me,” he said. He said, “I’m going on ahead, and you can follow me.” Indirect speech shouldn’t concern us any further, since it’s actually part of the narrative.Ī dialogue tag can come before, after or in the middle of dialogue: Direct speech is written as if happening now. Indirect speech shouldn’t have quotes around it, and is written in the tense of the main narrative, usually past. Whereas indirect speech describes what the person said: ![]() ![]() Direct speech quotes the person’s actual words: Ive been asked to give a run-down of the correct way of punctuating dialogue and using dialogue tags, since this disappeared in the reconstruction of the forums.ĭialogue as written in fiction has two parts: the dialogue itself (ie the actual words spoken) and the dialogue tag (also called the attribution), which tells us who is speaking and how they’re speaking (eg he said).įirst, we need to distinguish between direct and indirect speech. As the upgrade to the site has been messing around with the format of some of these tacked grammar threads, I've decided to repost a couple of the longer ones from scratch, rather than try to fix them. ![]()
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