I agree (and strongly disagree) with a lot of what's been said. It happens to be that dialogue is one of my pet peeves. So get ready for the Karai's Dialogue Rant.
To answer Brina's question, you can write either "he said" or "said he." Both are grammatically correct. In American writing, though, the more common form is "he said." Also, he can put the dialogue tag at either the beginning or end of the dialouge, but traditionally in America it is used at the end of the sentence. This is my main disagreement with everyone: I don't think you should vary your way of writing a dialogue tag. If you write it "he said," always write it "he said." If you want the reverse of that, always do the reverse. You must teach your reader how to read your writing, so if you're not consistent you will confuse your reader. You want your story to be easy to read. Dialogue tags are garnish, not the meat; you don't want attention called to them. This is my big pet peeve with dialogue tags: they're useless. If there's a piece of dialogue in quotations, obviously someone said it. Saying "said" adds *nothing* to the writing. And if you have a question mark, it's obvious it was "asked." The only thing dialouge tags are good for is denoting a speaker, and what better way to do that than add an action (I know Siren mentioned this). Just remember, if you have a piece of dialouge, the action needs to correspond with the speaker. And if you have a new action with another character, that needs to go in a new paragraph. One of my other pet peeves with dialogue tags is when they're wordy. People like using simultaneous action and create tags like, "Leo said, spinning his swords." DON'T DO THIS! It's annoying, wordy and ruins the rhythm and flow of your story. Why not just say, "Leo spun his swords," instead of using a dialogue tag at all? So much neater and more efficient. And lastly, on punctuation, there are two ways to address the punctuation of dialogue if a dialogue tag interrupts dialogue from the same speaker. 1. If the dialogue tag occurs after a complete sentence, a comma is used inside the quotation marks and a period follows the dialogue tag. The continuing dialogue begins as a new sentence with a capital letter on the first word inside the quotation marks. An example: "I don't know what you're talking about," Raph said. "We didn't go anywhere last night." 2. If the dialogue tag is interrupting a sentence, a comma is used both inside the quotation marks and following the dialogue tag. The continuing dialogue is part of the same sentence and has a lower case letter on the first word inside the quotation marks. An example: "We know you went out. Your coats," Leo said, "were missing." Those are a few things I've noticed people have a lot of trouble with. One day I'm going to write a book on writing and have an entire chapter just for dialogue--I gave you the abridged version of Karai's Dialouge Rant. If anyone wants more dialogue advice (or other writing advice), please feel free to ask. I think my creative writing degree and editing internships should be put to more use. --Karai
