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Punctuating Dialogue
By Marg
Gilks
Think about it:
there's a pretty boggling array of punctuation marks at our disposal
-- not just your run-of-the-mill sentence-enders like periods,
question marks, and exclamation points, but slashes and dashes
and dots of various sorts. I just used six of them in that first
sentence, alone. No wonder some writers think of the whole mess
as though it were Dorothy's lions and tigers and bears (oh my!).
Like it or not,
punctuation is something you have to master. Think of all those
odd marks as your guideposts for your readers. Punctuation marks
tell readers to pause or stop when you intend them to; in partnership
with the words you choose, they add meter and rhythm to your writing
and make it dance off the page; they help convey emotion (...don't
they? You bet!); they clarify your meaning. (What's your first
reaction to this sentence?: "While we were eating the cat on the table jumped
down." While we were eating the cat?! What a difference a
comma makes!: "While we were eating, the cat on the table jumped
down.")
Punctuation in
dialog can be particularly intimidating. Now you're constructing
sentences in which characters are speaking sentences of their
own! Where do all those punctuation marks go?
If your character
utters a complete sentence, should you punctuate it as such? Only
if that's all there is to it:
Mark
pointed at the sky. "It's going to rain."
Here there are
two separate actions, treated as two separate sentences. So you
punctuate them as such, the only difference being that Mark's
speech is indicated by being enclosed in quotation marks.
Dialogue
Tags
What if you want
to make sure the reader knows Mark is speaking by including a
dialog tag? If you're adding a straightforward tag like "he
said," "Mark whispered," or "shouted Mark,"
that's part of the sentence, so you include it in the sentence
with a comma:
"It's
going to rain," Mark said.
Mark
pointed at the sky and whispered, "It's going to rain."
Two mental tricks
that may help: think of Mark's speech as something you're relating
to a friend. You wouldn't say, "Then Mark said. It was going
to rain." You'd say, "Mark said it was going to rain."
Or, try taking
the quotation marks out and punctuating the sentence as a normal
sentence:
It's
going to rain, shouted Mark.
Then put in the
quotation marks when you've got that sorted out:
"It's
going to rain," shouted Mark.
Shouting implies
that Mark is a bit more excited about all of this rain than a
mere comma indicates, however. Perhaps an exclamation point would
better signal his excitement to the reader. But an
! is ending punctuation, and
you'd really like to make sure the reader knows Mark's the one
getting excited. You can do this in two ways. You can avoid the
whole issue of comma vs. exclamation mark by inverting the sentence
and letting the exclamation mark fill its end-punctuation role:
Mark pointed
at the sky and shouted, "It's going to rain!"
Or, you can take advantage of
the double standard sometimes offered by quotation marks by treating
them -- and what they enclose -- as something of a parenthetical
element within the sentence. Just as you may enclose a comment
in brackets (the proper term for these brackets is parentheses),
you can think of anything within quotation marks as something
a little separate from the rest of the sentence. In cases where
you want to convey excitement or confusion, the comma can safely
be replaced by an exclamation point or a question mark:
"It's
going to rain!" Mark shouted.
"What
do we do now?" asked Cindy.
Perhaps Cindy
doesn't come right out and ask Mark what they should do, but only
thinks this. There's a question involved, even if it's not spoken
out loud. Where does the question mark fall?
Again, you could
avoid the whole issue. You could fall back on exposition:
Cindy wondered
what they would do now.
But you lose
the immediacy by stepping out of your character's head and telling
the reader what she's thinking. You don't want that.
It's perfectly
all right to treat Cindy's internal dialog as though she'd spoken
it:
What
do we do now? Cindy wondered.
Note that, in
character dialog, whether internal or spoken, the question mark
always falls after the actual question, not after the dialog tag
at the end of the sentence. That's because you're relaying Cindy's
thoughts, complete with the guideposts that will make them clear
to the reader, not actually wondering yourself what the characters
will do now -- one hopes.
Punctuation
Within Dialogue
You have noticed
by now that all end punctuation falls inside the closing quotation
mark, right?
Correct:
"It's going to rain," said Mark.
Incorrect:
"It's going to rain", said Mark.
Okay, so what
if you're writing a sentence in which your character is quoting
what someone else said? How do you punctuate that so the reader
can sort it all out? Simple. Just as
you treat character dialog as a parenthetical element within a
sentence and flag it as dialog by enclosing it within quotation
marks, you treat the quote as parenthetical within the character's
spoken sentence and flag it with single quotation marks:
"I
don't like Cindy," Mark said. "I told her it was about
to rain, but she turned to Biff and asked him, 'What do we do
now?' instead of asking me."
Multi-Paragraph
Quotes
Perhaps Mark
has more to say about Cindy; maybe he goes on for several paragraphs,
complaining about every little thing about her that annoys him.
How to punctuate that? Well, he's still speaking, even though
he's speaking so much, it needs to be broken into paragraphs.
So, you start out with your opening quotation marks to signal
to the reader that somebody's speaking. But when you reach the
end of the first paragraph in Mark's tirade, you don't end that
paragraph with closing quotation marks. By leaving the closing
quotes out, you're telling the reader that Mark has more to say;
drop your eyes down to the next paragraph, reader, and you'll
read what more there is.
And when they
do, there they find another set of opening quotation marks at
the beginning of that paragraph, assuring them that yes, Mark's
still speaking. And so on and so on, for as many paragraphs that
Mark may speak, until the end of the last paragraph of his tirade,
where he finally shuts up and you tell the reader so by inserting
those long-awaited closing quotation marks:
"I
don't like Cindy," Mark said. "I told her it was about
to rain, but she turned to Biff and asked him, 'What do we do
now?' instead of asking me.
"Now,
if you ask me, Cindy's a bit snooty. She thinks she's too good
for me, that I don't know anything except that it's going to rain.
Well, let me tell you, I know a lot more than that!
"I
know, for instance, that if it had happened in Antarctica, that rain would have been snow!"
What if Biff
had been standing there listening, and didn't agree with what
Mark was saying? What if he'd interrupted to say so? You signal
the dialog of each new speaker with its own quotation marks, and
you make it even clearer to the reader that someone else is talking
by giving the new speaker their own paragraph for their action:
"I
don't like Cindy," Mark said. "I told her it was about
to rain, but she turned to Biff and asked him, 'What do we do
now?' instead of asking me.
"Now,
if you ask me, Cindy's a bit snooty. She thinks she's too good
for me, that I don't know anything except that it's going to rain."
"She's
not snooty," Biff said. "She asked me because you don't
know anything except when it's going to rain."
"Well,
let me tell you, I know a lot more than that!" Mark retorted.
"I know, for instance, that if it had happened in Antarctica, that rain would have been snow!
"I
also know that you and Cindy are having an affair, and --
"
"Oh,
shut up," growled Biff.
Just as you break
a big project down into smaller parts to make it more manageable,
if you break your dialog sentences down into their separate sections,
punctuation isn't so scary, after all.
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