Video: How To Punctuate Your Dialogue


You’re in the thick of writing some characters’ conversations and it hits you: where do the commas go? Do you need one after an exclamation mark? How’s it supposed to look on the page?

We’ve broken down some dialogue into its simplest parts with our step-by-step, visual tutorial covering punctuation, dialogue tags, descriptors, and formatting.

When you’re writing your work and submitting it to places, you’ll look a lot more professional and it’ll be less work for your editor to go back and fix up those nitty-gritty bits…

Dialogue is something that you can easily get wrong with just one comma out of place. Check out the video in full below!

What to Take Away From This Video:

  1. Punctuation should always be inside the quotation marks.
  2. The simple comma is your friend! Use it when tying up speech around dialogue tags (the old favourite, ‘s/he said’).
  3. Each line of dialogue should be on a new line; keep the formatting nice and clean.

A great exercise is to pick two or three books (ones that you love!) and find some examples of dialogue. Each book may be slightly different in their smaller details, but it’s handy to see the basics of punctuation in action.

The best way to learn, of course, is by writing some dialogue yourself. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, because practice makes perfect!

Kyra Thomsen

Kyra is a writer and editor from Wollongong. She works full-time as a content writer while reading on the train and drafting short fiction stories in her spare time. Kyra won the 2012 Questions Writing Prize and has been published in Kindling, Seizure Online, Space Place & Culture and Tide. She enjoys admiring her bookshelves, watching cheesy shows on Netflix, and browsing her Tumblr. You can learn more about Kyra's previous publications, plus find fortnightly posts, on her website: kyrathomsen.com.

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