The first day of class is always exciting.
"Come in, come in," I greeted my students. "There are plenty of seats. Make yourselves comfortable."
One young woman wearing a Chicago White Sox jersey asked, "Is this the writing class?"
"It is."
She took a piece of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans and squinted to read it. "I just registered this afternoon. Is that okay?"
"Absolutely."
I had had some of them in previous classes. Jo Bernardi, petite and blonde and looking about ten months pregnant, eased herself into a chair in the front row.
"When's the baby due?" I asked her.
"Next Monday," she sighed.
"That's five more days. Think you'll make it that long?" Rosa Jankowski, another familiar face, grabbed the spot next to Jo.
With exhaustion evident in her voice, the mother-to-be said, "I'd be happy to give birth tonight, right here. Anything to have it over with!"
The third of the repeat offenders was Hank Abrahamer, all six-foot-six of him. He took the desk at the end of the second row so he'd have room to stretch out those long basketball player legs.
"If I didn't know any better," he drawled with a glance in Jo's direction, "I'd say you was gonna have a baby."
Jo laughed, but with a grimace.
I had ten names on the roster, so with the late registrant that put eleven in the class, which was just one shy of the limit. In addition to Jo, Rosa, and Hank, Lind Bosley was another student I'd had before, but the rest were first timers. We might have a good group or we might have a bunch of duds. One just never knew.
Okay, aspiring writers, let's get to work. I can't even begin to list all the self-published ebooks I've looked at that drive me up the wall because the authors don't know how to punctuate dialogue. One of the most effective ways to tell a story is through dialogue. Not only do your characters impart information directly through what they've said, but they also set the scene with their actions. Well-written dialogue is much much more than just the words the characters speak.
First of all, go into your word processing software -- which is probably MicroSoft Word -- and turn off smart quotes. This will ensure that you don't have any backward-facing quotation marks.
"Come in, come in," I greeted my students. "There are plenty of seats. Make yourselves comfortable."
This starts with the narrator "I" saying something, and the use of the speech tag "greeted" indicates the way in which she says it. But because she's greeting "my students," the reader also gets the information that the speaker is some kind of teacher and the people she's talking to are students. Because the actual dialogue portion is tied to the speech tag portion of the sentence, the two portions are joined with a comma, but because the speech tag section effectively ends that part of the sentence, a period follows.
The quotation begins again, with a capital letter because it's a whole new sentence, and then ends.
Unless the action involved is closely tied to the dialogue, always start a new paragraph when the dialogue is completed. Never have more than one speaker in the same paragraph. Never. The occasions on which you would do so are so rare as to justify the "never" command. Just don't do it.
Punctuation that is tied to the dialogue goes inside the quotation marks. In other words, that second comma indicates the end of the dialogue "Come in, come in," so it goes inside the marks. The period after "students" relates to the speech tag portion, so it stays outside.
One young woman wearing a Chicago White Sox jersey asked, "Is this the writing class?"
Because this character isn't given a name, the reader gets the impression that the narrator doesn't know her. But because the text has already stated this is a classroom and the narrator is a teacher, identifying this second speaker as a "young woman" allows the reader to discard any notions that this is, say a kindergarten or grade school class. Also, because of the apparel the student is wearing, this is a less than formal situation.
The comma indicates the end of the speech tag portion, so it goes outside the quotation marks. And because the dialogue portion is a new sentence for the speaker (even if not a new sentence for the writer), it begins with a capital letter. When it ends as a question, the appropriate punctuation stays inside the quotation marks.
"It is."
This short bit of dialogue responding to the question doesn't need a speech tag. There are only two people identified at this point, so the speaker for this little line is presumed to be the first-person narrator. It doesn't need a speech tag, which would be longer than the dialogue anyway. Leaving the speech tag off, in this case, allows the reader to read that quick response just as quickly as the narrator would have said it, thus keeping the flow of the story moving right along.
She took a piece of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans and squinted to read it. "I just registered this afternoon. Is that okay?"
Imagine that this is a scene in a movie. The student walks in, asks the teacher a question, the teacher answers, and then there's a pause while the student gets out the piece of paper. The objective of effectively written dialogue is to simulate that kind of action. The student makes her second comment and asks her second question after she has taken the paper out of her jeans (which is another descriptor to plant a visual image in the reader's mind). That she has to squint to read it tells the reader yet something more about the character, but without stopping the action to give a freeze-frame fashion show description of her.
The action part of this mini-scene does not include anything that describes how the speaker speaks, no speech tag. Therefore, the action part ends with a period.
Wrong: Walter stirred more salt into the soup, "I should have had a little garlic."
Right: Walter stirred more salt into the soup. "I should have had a little garlic."
Wrong: "The barn burned down six months ago," she looked at the blackened timbers.
Right: "The barn burned down six months ago." She looked at the blackened timbers.
The reader's eye does register the intricacies of punctuation, so that the more accurate yours is, the easier the reader will be able to sink into the story. Proper punctuation will allow the reader to hear exactly what you want her to hear.
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