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Dialogue is the exchange of spoken words between two or more characters in a book, play, or other written work. In prose writing, lines of dialogue are typically identified by the use of quotation marks and a dialogue tag, such as "she said." In plays, lines of dialogue are preceded by the name of the person speaking.
Place a comma after the dialogue tag followed by open quotation marks, the dialogue starting with a capital letter followed by the punctuation mark of the quote and close quotation marks. For example: Josh mumbled, “Nobody understands the main problem here.”. A dialogue can also appear at the end of the sentence.
Here are a few tips: Strong Dialogue Tags: Sometimes, you need to be more specific than just “he said” or “she said”. Example: “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed Sarah. Action Beats: Break up chunks of dialogue with actions that show who’s speaking. Example: Tom slammed his fist on the table. “I won’t stand for this!”.
Inner dialogue is the dialogue a character has inside their head. This inner dialogue can be a monologue. In most cases, inner dialogue is not marked by quotation marks. Some authors mark inner dialogue by italicizing it. Outer dialogue is dialogue that happens externally, often between two or more characters. This is the dialogue that goes ...
- Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered. In the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, we meet Willa Knox, a middle-aged and newly unemployed writer who has just inherited a ramshackle house.
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. In the first piece of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice, we meet Mr and Mrs Bennet, as Mrs Bennet attempts to draw her husband into a conversation about neighborhood gossip.
- Naomi Alderman, The Power. In The Power, young women around the world suddenly find themselves capable of generating and controlling electricity. In this passage, between two boys and a girl who just used those powers to light her cigarette.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. Here, friends Tommy and Kathy have a conversation after Tommy has had a meltdown. After being bullied by a group of boys, he has been stomping around in the mud, the precise reaction they were hoping to evoke from him.
Dialogue, when used effectively in a literary work, is an important literary device. Dialogue allows writers to pause in their third-person description of a story’s action, characters, setting, etc., which can often feel detached to the reader if prolonged. Instead, when characters are “speaking” in first-person in a narrative, the story ...
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Dec 5, 2021 · Dialogue is a written or spoken exchange of words between one or more characters. Most narrative stories feature this verbal communication, which is often easily identifiable by either quotations in literature or dedicated spaces in scripts. Dialogue has various uses, though it is most often for the purposes of advancing the plot and building ...
