Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I didn’t pay as close attention during grammar lessons in English class as I used to. For example, it was only within the past decade that I discovered the following rule:
“When dialogue spoken by a single character runs for more than one paragraph, omit your closing quotes at the end of the paragraph – but use opening quotes at the beginning of the next paragraph.”
I found this out while co-writing a short story with Michelle Sagara West, and was horribly embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of this rule.
Here are some useful resources I’ve found about punctuating within dialogue, in case anyone else needs a brush-up:
Dialogue Punctuation Made Simple – by Rachel Simon
Punctuation Dialogue – by Marg Gilks
How To Punctuate Dialogue Correctly – by Ginny Wiehardt
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is one of the rules I knew, but thought I made up just for myself because you so rarely see it used any more. What I started doing was ending the first paragraph and then having some kind of action at the top of the next paragraph before the character started speaking again. Still works.
Love this illustration!
The punctuation mark that seems to be following everyone home right now is the apostrophe…or at least it’s the one that keeps popping out at me.
That’s funny – I think the last time I saw that I thought it was a typo, that they missed the end quotes. I tend to be pretty good with random grammar rules too. I imagine that would be a bit more embarrassing, if you tried to tell them they made a typo when they fixed your typo instead. So see, it could have been worse.
Uh, Rachel Simon seems to have re-arranged her site…