DIALOGUE 101 -- authors, please read!

[Aquarius]

In editing for my fanzine, and validating fics for the Expanse, I often find that the most common errors usually relate to dialogue. Sometimes it's an author who doesn't know how to punctuate dialogue correctly, sometimes it's improper use of tags, sometimes it's other stuff. I've also seen incorrectly presented dialogue at all levels of writing experience, from complete rookies to people who teach for a living, so nobody's infallible.

With this in mind, I decided to start a thread in which every few days, I'll post a different "lesson" on the dos and don'ts of writing dialogue. Some things will be immediately recognizable and you'll say to yourself, "Oh, crap! I didn't realize you weren't supposed to do that!" Other things, you'll need to read the lesson, then examine your current works in progress and future projects to make sure they agree with the lessons, since sometimes the difference between what you're doing and what you're supposed to do can be subtle.

It's my hope that every writer at the Expanse, whether a complete beginner or an experienced admin, will take something new away from this thread and be able to use it. This is also good brush-up for beta readers, as it's more helpful to us at the admin level if these issues are caught in the beta and proofreading process.

You may post your questions about the lessons to the thread, or you may contact me via PM.

I hope this helps!

[Kathy Rose]

Hey, anything that can improve my writing is all right by me. Thanks, Aquarius. I'm looking forward to this. I might learn something.

[Aquarius]

LESSON 1: What is a dialogue tag?

Dialogue tags are those parts of a sentence that tell us who's talking, and sometimes how they're talking as well. Tags can come before a line of dialogue, after it, or they can break up a line of dialogue somewhere in the middle.

Examples of this include, but are not limited to:

Trip said, "I sure hope Chef made catfish for dinner tonight."

"Remain at your station," ordered T'Pol.

"I wanted to go to the movie," said Hoshi, "but I was helping Phlox catch his bat."

"Said" and "asked" are going to be the most common tags you use. Obviously they can get a little more complex than that, but exercise caution and discretion because:

1. The fancier the word, the more likely it is to pull a reader out of the story, and the more pretentious you sound.

Yes, it's tempting to pepper our prose with "declared," "Inquired," "exclaimed," etc., especially because of those high school English teachers who told us we need to change things up in order to make our writing more dynamic. While they were right about that, dialogue tags usually aren't the best place to do it. Most times, you should be writing the line itself in a way that conveys to the reader something about how it's being said anyway--which will also accomplish the task of keeping your writing dynamic.

Occasionally, there will be exceptions. You might want to say "she sputtered" because if you literally wrote her line all sputter-y, the reader might not understand what she's saying. There are other times when it's appropriate to change it up, too, but the pros generally agree: your readers don't care how many different ways you know how to say "said," so just stick with "said." It's the least conspicuous and disruptive to what the reader does care about, which is what your characters are going to say or do next.

2. Watch your pronouns.

If only two people are in a scene, and one is male and the other is female, the old "he said"/"she said" isn't so problematic. But conversations where there's more than one participant of the same gender? It's a total nightmare when you don't use their names!

Again, it's easy to succumb to the temptation to "change it up," especially if you're feeling like an old Dick and Jane book when you're using a character's name over and over. But if you don't, your poor reader is going to have a hard time keeping track of who's saying what.

As a rule of thumb, pronouns like he, she, him, her, etc. all refer to the last person of that gender mentioned. Hook your reader up by using a name every so often, so when you say "he said," we know who "he" is.

I will post another lesson in a couple of days. I hope this helped!

[Artisticmom2]

Thank you! That was great to know and now I can go peruse my WIP and see what I need to work on!

[Linkin]

Ah xD Much appreciated, thanks!

[Misplaced]

Thanks for this, Aquarius. It's always good to have a refresher on this stuff. :

[Aquarius]

Got time for a quick one today, so...

LESSON 2: You can't "say" a semicolon.

There are consistently two problems I encounter involving semicolons when betaing/valadating fics: half the time they're used incorrectly, and the other half the time, I see them in dialogue.

First, lets examine what a semicolon (;) does.

A semicolon's job is to connect two complete thoughts (sentences) that are so closely related that they shouldn't stand apart. Many times I see the semicolon used to join a complete sentence to a fragment (incorrect) or two fragments together (also incorrect); commas are appropriate in both those situations. (My use of the semicolon is acceptable there, but were I to beta that sentence I'd suggest to the writer to consider a period because it's stronger and the dependency of the two sentences is debatable.)

So, why can't I use it in dialogue to join together two complete, related thoughts?

The simple answer: how do you "say" a semicolon?

Though in print, dialogue's job is to represent speech. In actual speech, there are subtle cues we pick up on when thoughts, both complete and incomplete, are separated. We are born "wired" to speak and hear, so it doesn't take much to make those distinctions, and to understand each other even when errors are made. A "verbal comma" connecting fragments is just a tad shorter of a pause than a "verbal period", which would conclude a thought.

Print is a different animal, though. Reading and writing are artificial, and their relationship to what we speak is completely arbitrary. The symbol for the letter "A" could've been anything but what we actually decided on and still mean "A".

In dialogue, the job of commas and periods are to show us where those verbal pauses go, while keeping related units (phrases and sentences) grouped together so the reader can understand what the hell the character is saying. Again, a comma is a slightly shorter pause than a period. Since the related units following both a period and a semicolon are supposed to be complete sentences, there is no way to differentiate which kind of "pause" to use when speaking it -- in speech, you're not going to tell the other people in the conversation, "Oh, by the way, that was a semicolon I just said." No, you're going to just let your sentences and fragments stand for themselves.

Likewise for written speech. If you can't hear the difference in the "punctuation," you don't write the difference.

Furthermore, a semicolon doesn't add any information about *how* the sentence is spoken by the character, the way a period, question mark, exclamation point, ellipses (to show a long pause or trailing off), or dashes (to show interruption or an abrupt ending) do.

So long story short: don't use semicolons within your dialogue! And even in the narrative, use them sparingly.

I will post another lesson in a couple of days.

Hope this helped.

[tish]

Excellent idea, Aquarius, I do need a refresher course in these lessons. Thanks!

[Aquarius]

For anyone interested in continuing the semicolon debate, I've split the relevant posts off and moved the thread to here, down in Main Engineering. Feel free to carry on down there.

As for this thread, I'd prefer it if we confine discussion to the "I don't get it"/"I need help"/"What about this situation?" type, so people who need help or don't understand can easily get/find the help they need.

The teacher doesn't mind if you want to argue with her. Just please quote the post in question and paste it into a new thread down in the Resources for Writers section. If I'm wrong about something, I can always come back and amend the post. Thanks.

[Putaro]

Here's a question I have. I usually write a character's thoughts in italics without quotes. When I have a question or exclamation, the punctuation looks awkward to me in the middle of the sentence. Am I doing it right or is there a recommended way to combine a tag after a thought question or exclamation?. For example:
Why did he do that? wondered T'Pol.

Actually, I think even in regular dialogue with quotes I find myself fighting with Word over capitalization since it thinks the punctuation ended the sentence.

Thanks!