I will no longer be updating this guide. I'm leaving it up in case it will continue to be helpful to anyone in the future.
People have asked me writing tips, Wattpad tips, and whatever. This is some of that advice I give them. Keep in mind most of t...
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Dialogue tags. To a man I think every single one of us has screwed these up at least once in our writing lives. It wasn't until my friend helped me trudge through the Freelander first draft dredge that I learned I'd been doing it wrong. A dialogue tag is said/says, asked/ask, whispered/whisper, shout/shouted, and all those creative words you might have used. I said, John said, he asked—those are all tags.
Whenever these tags are used it requires a comma, not a full stop (.), either before or after the tag depending on if the tag comes before the speech or after. If you're using an action or description after the line of conversation then it becomes a full stop. The reason for this is because "he said" can be a sentence on its own, but it's fragmented if it's a sentence. Fragmented sentences nine times out of ten need to be rewritten. But there's really no way to unfragment "he said." So instead of it being fragmented, you're joining it via a comma to the sentence which creates the speech. In the case of using descriptions and actions, those are already full sentences so it would become a run-on sentence if you were to join it with the speech. Hopefully that makes sense. If not, bear with me I'll have samples soon.
In the case of the pronoun (he, she, they) speaking vs. the subject (I, Molly, Joe) the pronoun is always lower case and the subject is always upper case, even if it's an exclamation or a question mark. The lone exception is if the pronoun and the tag comes before the speech. Because I'm not sure I'm explaining this properly, I'm just going to go into showing it. I'll try to think of as many variations of conversation as I can to show you all the examples.
Pay attention to what has a full stop vs. what has a comma and where the comma is. This is how I learned the correct way, my friend showing me various sets of dialogue vs. her trying to explain it to me. I'm sometimes a visual learner, which is why I have a hard time explaining things myself.
John said, "Hello." - Because the tag goes before the actual speech, the comma is after the dialogue tag.
"Hello," John said. – Because the tag is after the speech, we put the comma within the dialogue, but before John.
"My turtle died last night," he said. - Note the lower case h for "he" this is because it's a pronoun, not the subject.
"Give it to me!" he shouted.
Sally asked, "Where did he go?"
"Where did he go?" Sally asked.
"This is so cool." She looked around, her eyes wide, and started bouncing in place. – Because this doesn't involve a tag, we use a period aka full stop.
"I don't know what to say." The voice was distant, carried closer on the cool breeze brushing her skin. – You might be wondering why "the voice" isn't a tag that would come with a comma, because the voice is the speaker so you'd think it would make sense to use a comma. But in this case "the voice" is part of the description. If you had done this. . .
