ShmoopTube

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[Coop and Dino singing]

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Writing realistic dialogue can be tough after all you can't have

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characters grunting at each other for an entire book [A couple grunting while eating a meal]

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well maybe you could but it'd be pretty weird book and there's a whole lot of

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rules we have to follow to make sure our dialogue is clear to the reader but [Man nailing rules to a wall]

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never fear we've got some handy dandy tools in our dialogue tool belt and it's

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fashionable to so one important tool at our disposal our dialogue tags [Coop discussing dialogue tags]

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those are simply phrases that identify who said what and we guarantee you've

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seen these before stuff like he said or she said...those are dialogue tags [Examples of dialogue tags]

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they come in handy because the more people are speaking the more important

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it is for the reader to know who's saying what it can be hard enough

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keeping track of a multi-person conversation in person [Lots of people having separate conversations]

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just imagine what it's like when those people don't even have distinct faces

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actually don't imagine that kind of freaky anyway these guys can be as [Boy runs away from faceless people at a dinner table]

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descriptive as you want for example if a woman whispers

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something you can use the tag she whispered or if a man screams something [Man wearing black sunglasses walks into library]

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you can use the tag he screamed we just hope he was polite enough not to scream

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in anyone's ear... There are also a lot of rules that cover the punctuation of

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dialogue one major one is that we use a comma to separate the dialogue tag from [Dino teaching the punctuation of dialogue]

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the actual dialogue so if some guy who works at a pet store picks up a dog and

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says this is a terrier we'd write that as he said comma this is a terrier with [Man holding a terrier dog]

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a comma-separating the dialogue tag from the actual dialogue we could also flip

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the dialogue tag in the dialogue making sure that we continue to separate them

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with a comma we could even add some more text to either side of the dialogue and

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all we need is comma's on either side of the quote to keep it separated turns out

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it's much easier to separate texts for dialogue that it is to separate terrier [Terrier chewing on man's tie]

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from your favorite tie.. The only time this comment separation thing doesn't work is

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if we're dealing with questions or exclamations say the guy now asks the

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terrier are you eating my tie? If any texts came before the dialogue we'd [Man asks terrier if it is eating his tie]

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still separate the two with a comma but if any text comes after the question mark remains in

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place and does the separating same thing happens if it's an explanation like

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you're eating my tie! and yeah he totally is oh and one last

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thing the punctuation that ends dialogue always stays inside the quotation marks

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no matter where the surrounding text happens to be unlike a hungry terrier

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punctuation never manages to escape [Terrier runs away from man holding ties]

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