The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook

2. How Should You Format and Punctuate Dialogue?

14 two How Should You Format and Punctuate Dialogue? Because examples in this chapter contain many quotation marks of their own, italics are used to indicate quoted or invented passages. Most writers in English choose one of four methods to show that a character is speaking. Of these methods, using double quotation marks is far and away the most common in American prose, so I’ll discuss it first. But I’ll also investigate other styles, because too often beginning writers don’t see them as options. Instead they go along with the double quotation mark convention out of some misguided idea that it’s incorrect or inappropriate to do anything else. As our discussion will show, many published authors certainly don’t believe that. Mastery means being able to exploit every element of language to create your desired effect, and nontraditional dialogue formatting, when used judiciously and thoughtfully, can be another weapon in your arsenal. However, it can also backfire, so I’ll spend some time on the drawbacks of the various styles. Double Quotation Marks To repeat: In most American fiction, writers use double quotation marks to indicate when a person is speaking. Here’s a sliver of conversation from Ann Beattie’s “A Vintage Thunderbird”: “Would you think it was awful if I offered to go to bed with you?” Stephanie asked. “No,” he said. “I think it would be very nice.” It’s important to master the punctuation and formatting that go with this convention (and I mean master; it really should become second nature), F o r m at t in g a nd P u nc t u at in g D i a l o g u e | 15 mostly because you’re likely to use it, but also because the other methods integrate its concepts. So here are five basics elements of formatting and punctuating dialogue that uses double quotation marks. 1. If a line of dialogue is followed by a dialogue tag (he said, she commented , etc.), then a comma should come before the final quotation mark. That’s why there’s a comma after the “No” in the example’s second line: “No,” he said. Here’s an exception: if the line of dialogue is a question, as is the first one in the Ann Beattie example, then you use a question mark and skip the comma. The same holds true for exclamations (“Hell yes!” he said.). Later on, we’ll discuss some other implications of using exclamation points and question marks near or within dialogue. 2. When a dialogue tag comes before a line of speech, a comma should appear at the end of the tag and before the first quotation mark. In the example’s first line, Beattie could have easily reversed the order of the tag and the dialogue, but if she’d done so, she would have needed a comma after the introductory tag. It would have looked like this: Susan asked, “Would you think it was awful if I offered to go to bed with you?” 3. Dialogue tags are often put between words spoken by a single character , as we can see in the Beattie example’s last line: “No,” he said. “I think it would be very nice.” When punctuating such dialogue, it’s important to pay attention to the grammar of the speech. To illustrate the point, let’s look at two passages from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge: “How can it be,” said Olive, “that you grow up in Vermont and can’t even drive a car?” “The funeral’s private,” Daisy told Harmon. “Just the family.” In both examples, the writer puts the dialogue tag in the middle of words spoken by a single character. There are significant differences between them, though. In the first one, a comma follows the dialogue tag said Olive, and the first word in Olive’s second speech segment (that) is not capitalized . This is because the quoted segments form a monolithic grammatical element; How can it be that you grow up in Vermont and can’t even drive a car? is a single sentence, which the author has decided to interrupt with a dialogue tag for pacing reasons. 16 | S t ylis t ic D ecisi o ns On the other hand, the second example shows a character making two separate statements. The first part is a complete sentence: The funeral’s...