Let’s pull up stumps and retire to the pavilion for tea.’ In British and Commonwealth English, single quotation marks are the standard.Įxample: ‘I say, old bean,’ the wicketkeeper said, ‘Thomas really hit us for six. In American English, direct speech is normally represented with double quotation marks.Įxample: “Hey, Billy! I’m driving to the drug store for a soda and Charleston Chew. Use double quote marks for dialogue (if you’re in America) Now that we’ve covered the #1 rule of dialogue punctuation, let’s dig into some of the more nuanced points. My father forced us to go camping, insisting that it would “build character”. Mark’s favorite short story was “The Gift of the Magi”. In those cases, the period is not used for spoken dialogue but for quoting sentence fragments, or perhaps when styling the title of a short story. You might see editors occasionally place a period outside the quotation marks. If the utterance (to use a fancy linguistics term for dialogue 🤓) ends in a question mark or exclamation point, they would also be placed inside the quotation marks.Įxception: When it’s not direct dialogue. If the speaker is attributed before the dialogue, there is a comma outside the quotation marks.Įxample: Aleela whimpered, “I don’t want to. Insert a comma inside the quotation marks when the speaker is attributed after the dialogue.Įxample: “Come closer so I can see you,” said the old man. This is what we call “attribution” when you're punctuating dialogue. You should always have the period inside the quote when completing a spoken sentence.Īs you’ll know, the most common way to indicate speech is to write dialogue in quotation marks and attribute it to a speaker with dialogue tags, such as he said, she said, or Margaret replied, or chirped Hiroko. But it’s pretty simple, once you get the hang of it. The misplacement of periods and commas is the most common mistake writers make when punctuating dialogue. Always put commas and periods inside the quote Don’t use end quotes between paragraphs of speechġ.
Deploy single quote marks used for quotes within dialogue Use dashes and ellipses to cut sentences off Start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes
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