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~I've found her! My New Best
Friend/Beta Reader!
~GW (I
know you've offered before, I'm jest playin'...)
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
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