Punctuating Dialogue
Rule 1: Start a new paragraph when each new character speaks.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
-From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rule 2: Use a dialogue tag (whispered Mrs. Banasik, screamed Mrs. Schiavo) at least once per
conversation for each character to show your readers who is talking.
“Ha! That’s good. And don’t call me Chip. Call me the Colonel.”
I stifled a laugh. “The Colonel?”
“Yeah. The Colonel. And we’ll call you… hmm. Pudge.”
“Huh?”
“Pudge,” the Colonel said. “Because you’re skinny. It’s called irony, Pudge.
Heard of it?”
-From Looking for Alaska by John Green
Rule 3: Put everything the character is saying in quotation marks “ “ and make sure you have
both sets!
Rule 4: Separate your character’s words from the dialogue tag with a comma. If your
character’s sentence ends with a ? or a !, you don’t need a comma!
My dad—who picked up an extra one-to-nine-a.m. Friday-night shift and is
therefore leaving for work—says, “Are you the new kid?”
“Is that the English-language human term you will call me, Earthling?” Boy21
says. “New kid?”
“Did he just call me Earthling?” Dad says to me. His expression makes him look
uncomfortable, like he’s squinting directly into the sun.
I shrug.
-From Boy 21 by Matthew Quick
Rule 5: Start what your character is saying with a Capital Letter.