How to Format Dialogue

As a writer, I spend time in writing communities with people of varying levels of experience with the craft. Across those communities, one of the most common mistakes I see people make is not formatting dialogue correctly. While there are already a number of good resources for how to punctuate and format dialogue, in this post specifically I want to delve into the why of dialogue punctuation, and provide a (mostly) comprehensive overview of various interesting cases that can crop up.

In general, I will be using CMOS as my style guide; as always, check with your own style guide. However, on matters of dialogue, I believe all of the major ones agree—with the biggest differences being between US and UK usage in places. I will try to call those out as I can. I will also be speaking from an American perspective, particularly when it comes to terms for pieces of punctuation.

And, your eternal caveat: I’m not a professional linguist or editor, this is all just stuff I’ve picked up over the years from my interest in linguistics and writing. However, I’m pretty sure this all conforms to CMOS, if not other style guides. If there are errors, please do let me know and I will endeavor to correct them.

I am aware that some of the examples don’t render well on mobile; I’ve tried a variety of things to ameliorate this, to no avail. My apologies, I’ll continue to try to fix this as I can.

The First Rule of Writing

I do want to also keep in mind that the most important thing is for the reader to be able to understand what’s happening in the prose.¹ All of these rules ultimately exist to serve that purpose, and experienced readers will come to expect them. This is also why being consistent is of primary importance, even if you don’t follow the rules verbatim. If you have your own internally consistent rules that are made clear to the reader, the reader can understand the things you’re writing about, even if it doesn’t follow an external style guide strictly speaking. So if you’re going to break these rules, at least be consistent about it.

But above all: make sure the reader can follow what’s going on.

Parts of a Sentence

Before we actually get started with dialogue, I first want to do a bit of a review of how English sentences are organized, as I think that may help shed some light on things.

I want to start by making sure we’re on the same page with some terms about parts of a sentence—or more properly, of a clause.² Sentences can be broken up into two constituent parts: the subject and the predicate.³ The subject is what the sentence is about, whereas the predicate is the rest: the thing being said about the subject. These terms are a little clunky, including how they split a sentence, but the reason for this mostly derives all the way back to Aristotelian logic, in which philosophers would try to say things that are “true” about the world.

A predicate itself can be broken into several parts; the two that we’re concerned with are the verb and the optional object.⁴ If a sentence does not have an object, it is called intransitive, and describes a subject doing the action of the verb. However, if there is an object, then the sentence is called transitive, and describes a subject doing the verb to the object.⁵ Thinking of sentences (or clauses) in terms of its subject, verb, and object is extremely helpful for understanding a lot of things about typography and formatting in Publisher’s English.

An example sentence, broken down:

Alison ate an apple.

This will become relevant to dialogue soon, I promise.

Sentence Structure

English is what’s known as a Subject-Verb-Object language, or SVO for short, which means that in a normal, average sentence that has a subject, a verb, and an object, they go in that order:

Alison greeted Carol.

English is a language that decides this primarily by placement in the sentence—notice how if you rearrange those words into “Carol greeted Alison”, it means something different.

This is relatively straightforward with a simple sentence. In more complex sentences—such as those with indirect objects, adverbial phrases, or dependent clauses—this of course gets more complicated. Ultimately for our purposes, though, we are just concerned about these three things: subject, verb, and (direct) object.

It’s also worth noting that English is not always strict about its SVO word order; in particular, later we’ll talk about a common different structure seen in dialogue. There are other cases that we won’t talk about in this blog post.⁶

So now, let’s look at a sentence where the object is an abstract thing, not a person:

Alison said her speech.

Here, you’ll notice that the structure of the sentence is exactly like “Alison greeted Carol” or “Alison ate an apple”. Just now, the verb—the action that Alison is taking—is to say something, and what she is saying is a speech. We don’t know the contents of that speech from this sentence, but we know that Alison said it, whatever it is.

But what if we wanted to reproduce in the text exactly what Alison said? I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Quotation

Quotation is actually a rather interesting philosophical discussion, it turns out—it’s called the use–mention distinction. Essentially, we’re able to differentiate between when we’re talking about a thing, or about the word that means the thing. And to do that latter part typographically, we use quotation marks⁷.

This also rears its head with direct quotations, where we reproduce in a text the exact words that somebody says. It’s the exact same sort of idea: we’re not intending the meaning of the words, we’re intending a block of text that refers to the meaning of the words. It’s a subtle point.

In United States English, the way we go up this level from meaning to use—that is, the way we punctuate dialogue—is with double quotation marks, with some variation as discussed below. In some UK style books, this is single quotation marks. I will be using the American style here—especially as it seems to potentially be making headway in the UK from my observation.

That all said, we can now produce a sentence that transcribes exactly what it was that Alison said:

Alison said “yes”.

In this example, “yes”⁸ is the object of the sentence—that is, the whole quotation is the object, including the quotation marks, and for the purposes of arranging things around in the sentence, essentially is treated like a single, opaque unit. I like to think of it as a “box” that I can’t see inside. And, the quotation marks are part of that box; I like to think of them as the actual box container itself, with the dialogue the stuff in the box. It’s a bit of a weird metaphor, but I think it really helps clarify how to format things.

In either case, this is the most simple sort of sentence you can construct that contains quoted dialogue. Note, however, that what is transcribed as Alison’s speech here is a single word; it is not a complete sentence, much less multiple sentences. That makes things a little more complicated—and is often where people get tripped up.

There is, however, one point of order when ending a sentence, before we discuss that. Namely…

Where does the period go?

If you go back and look at that last example sentence, it might look a little weird. Namely, because the period ending the sentence is placed outside of the quotation marks. In a monospaced font—such as on a typewriter—this looks even weirder. So historically, in the United States at least, if a sentence ends with a quotation, the ending period is then pulled into the quotes:

Alison said “yes.”

The advantage of this style is that it often looks nicer, and is consistent with other usage with commas I’ll get to later. However, it sometimes can misrepresent what’s being quoted, which is an issue that particularly afflicts technical documentation; for instance, in the text editor vim, the command sequences dd and dd. do two different things, and so making sure to clearly indicate which should be typed is important. For this reason, the formatting I used earlier—with the period outside of the quotes—is sometimes called logical punctuation; the other—inside the quotes—is called typesetters’ punctuation.⁹ These tend to be used in the UK and the US, respectively, but that’s not necessarily a good rule of thumb.¹⁰

Personally, I tend to prefer logical punctuation because of its accuracy to what is said. However, I’ll use typesetters’ punctuation for the course of this post—aside from the earlier example—but will also try to call out where the two differ, which is fewer places than you might think.

Complete Sentences

Things get more complicated when the dialogue you’re quoting is more than just a word or a phrase, and is instead a full sentence—or multiple sentences. However, the key thing is to always go back to the three high-level parts of an English sentence: subject, verb, and object. The dialogue is the object, and everything inside of the quotation marks is treated like a single unit.

There are two quirks with how this works, but I will start with an example:

Alison said, “I want to leave.”

The first quirk is that the ending period is inside of the quotes, and this would be the same in both logical punctuation and typesetters’ punctuation. You might think that in logical punctuation you would put two periods, one for inside the quoted text and one for the sentence itself, but it follows the rule that if there would be two sentence-enders like that, it “collapses” to the one inside of the quotes.

Or more generally, if you have a comma, period, question mark, or exclamation point inside of a quotation; and then would have one of those also right outside of the quotation; then you only use the one inside of the quotation marks.¹¹

The second quirk is the comma, and the use of commas around dialogue is where people get tripped up most of the time. You might be asking, “Why do I need a comma? Didn’t Megan already say the quotation was an opaque box?” And that’s a very good question!

The ultimate answer, though, is “because that’s the convention.” When dialogue is the object of a sentence, then it’s separated from the non-dialogue text with a comma.¹² However, do note the earlier example where I did not do that when it wasn’t a full sentence—there are other occasions where you don’t use the comma for separation, but they’re less relevant to discussing dialogue.¹³ There are also situations where you use a colon instead of a comma, which boils down generally to “if the dialogue isn’t the object of a sentence, but rather is introduced by a complete sentence.” I won’t be covering that situation here, though.¹⁴

The third quirk is that the dialogue is capitalized as a complete sentence:

Alison said, “He was here.”

Finally, as a note of terminology, the subject and verb portion of the sentence—the “Alison said” that indicates who’s speaking—is often called a dialogue tag.¹⁵

And there you have it! How to punctuate sentences with dialogue in them! Right?

Right?

Except that’s not how it’s usually written these days. Instead, it uses an inverted sentence structure.

What’s an inverted sentence structure, you ask? So glad you’re here.

Inverted Sentence Structure

So earlier, I alluded to the fact that English is not strictly a Subject-Object-Verb language, and gave as an example questions. There’s another less-common structure that isn’t SOV, either. You see, English will sometimes have OSV sentences—or as I prefer to write it, O,SV. This tends to show up more in poetry and rhetoric than the everyday casual use of English, but it is grammatical. It’s primarily used when trying to put emphasis on the object of a sentence,¹⁶ but OSV clauses show up in a variety of other places as well.

That said, let’s give a non-dialogue example:

This math problem, Alison doesn't understand.

You will notice that the way we punctuate this sort of sentence is by marking the object off with a comma. This is one way in writing that can we call attention to the unusual sentence structure—something that when spoken aloud can be conveyed with tone, stress, and rhythm.

It should therefore be pretty easy to see how dialogue fits into this pattern of sentence. After all, you often want to add special focus to the dialogue being said, so you would want to put it at the beginning. You therefore end up with the O,SV sentence structure:

“Yes,” Alison said.

This is the way a lot of dialogue in books is written these days. Though there is also another style that does even more inversion:

“Yes,” said Alison.

This acts almost exactly like the SV version, so I’m not going to cover it in any more depth, though it can give your text a bit of an “old-timey” feel to it.

Where does the comma go?

I also want to call attention to the comma inside the quotation, because that is the source of so many problems people have with punctuation in dialogue. Normally with a sentence in the O,SV pattern, you would expect the comma to be outside of the quote:

“Yes”, Alison said.

And this is how it is usually done in logical punctuation if the dialogue is not a full sentence. But if it is a full sentence, then you would want to have a period inside of the quotation marks and a comma outside of the quotation marks! And remember our rule: if you have something both inside and outside, inside wins—though in the O,SV pattern, if that would be a period, it is replaced with a comma:

“I want to leave,” Alison said.

And this is in to both logical and typesetters’ punctuation. Note that this applies even if the dialogue contains multiple sentences; the final sentence ends in a comma:

“Hello. Go away,” Alison said.

This all should seem rather straightforward now, if you pay attention to what the subject, verb, and object of the encompassing sentence are. If dialogue is part of the sentence, then it is separated from the subject and object by a comma. One quick rule of thumb you can use is to replace your dialogue with “the answer” or anything to that effect and see where you would then put commas, or a lack thereof:

The answer, Alison said. Alison said the answer.

And remember that quoted full-sentence dialogue always needs a comma separator.

Other Ways to End Dialogue

Of course, periods aren’t the only way to end sentences, even though that’s all I’ve talked about so far. However, there are other ways—just with a general rule that while periods become commas, the other pieces of punctuation don’t. Instead, the short answer is that they “override” the comma or the period inside of the quotation marks.

Let me go over the options quickly.

Question Marks and Exclamation Points

Question marks and exclamation points are straightforward. You use question marks to indicate questions,¹⁷ and exclamation points to indicate exclamations. And they, per the rule stated just above, “override” the comma or the period. This is a full replacement, and you don’t add any additional commas or periods in the process.

Some examples should make this salient. First, with the O,SV sentence order; note that the comma you would expect is “overridden”:

“I want to leave!” Alison shouted. “Can we leave?” Alison asked.

Next, the SVO sentence order. Note that a comma is still used to separate the dialogue-as-object from the rest of the sentence. However, the ending period has been “overridden” by the sentence-ending punctuation:

Alison shouted, “I want to leave!” Alison asked, “Can we leave?”

Notice also that even in typesetters’ punctuation, question marks and exclamation points are typically rendered following logical punctuation rules; this become relevant later with nested speech.

Ellipses

Ellipses are a little less straightforward, as they are generally involved in marking incomplete sentences. In nonfiction prose, they are primarily used in quotations to indicate things that have been left out. So if the original text said something to the effect of:

Alison, the woman known for reading books, was an introvert.

When quoting it you could use an ellipsis to denote places where text exists but is not being quoted (in this example, using logical punctuation):

As Bessel put it, “Alison…was an introvert”.

This then gets extended into indicating that the quoted text is from the middle of a sentence or paragraph:

Shakespeare wrote, “…or not to be, that is the question…”

However, when rendered in dialogue, an ellipsis is meant to indicate this sort of sense of “there’s a gap here.” CMOS¹⁸ calls this “faltering or fragmented speech.” When used in the middle of dialogue, it indicates a pause of some sort between words; and at the end of dialogue, that the speech is trailing off.

In general, when an ellipsis is at the end of a piece of dialogue in an O,SV sentence, it takes the place of the comma:¹⁹

“I was thinking…” Alison said.

If the dialogue that trails off would otherwise want an exclamation point or question mark, that goes after the ellipsis:

“What are you…” Alison asked.

Likewise, in an SVO sentence, it replaces the period:

Alison said, “I was thinking…”

And it maintains the exclamation point or question mark if appropriate:

“What are you…?” Alison asked.

Note that the speaker trailing off typically occurs because the speaker actually trails off, but it can also happen when the listener is moving away or no longer paying attention, thus making the speaker harder to hear. This applies similarly to an ellipsis in the middle: dialogue of someone talking over radio could use ellipses to indicate places where the static is too loud for the listener to hear.

Using an ellipsis at the beginning of dialogue is nonstandard, except in one situation: where the speaker was talking, and the listener is starting to listen somewhere in the middle, either because they moved closer or simply started to pay attention:

As I walked into the room, Alison was finishing her speech. “…thank you for coming tonight, everyone. Goodbye!”

Otherwise, I recommend avoiding it, as you don’t typically “trail off” into a piece of dialogue.²⁰

Em-Dashes

While ellipses indicate that the speaker has trailed off or otherwise left a gap in their speech, an em-dash²¹ is used to signal an abrupt end. This most often occurs in dialogue when someone is interrupted:

“My name is Alison Smith, and I—” The bell rang.

Note here that the em-dash takes the place of the period, and that because these are two different sentences, “the” is capitalized because it starts a new sentence. There are also situations where you might follow the O,SV sentence construction, in which case it takes the place of the comma:

“My name is—” Alison began, but stopped when the bell rang.

Em-dashes can also be used if speakers are abruptly changing their thoughts and interrupting themselves. They also can indicate parenthesis interrupting dialogue, as discussed below.

Capitalization of Pronouns

Until now I’ve been using a proper name for all of the dialogue—mostly because it makes the formatting not get screwed up when marking the subject of a sentence. However, this can potentially cause some confusion with capitalization. The key thing to remember is that the quoted dialogue is just the object of the sentence. As you only capitalize a pronoun if it’s at the start of a sentence,²² and if we’re doing the O,SV structure, we’re in the middle of the sentence so the pronoun shouldn’t be capitalized:

“Yes,” she said.

This applies even if the comma is overridden by sentence-ending punctuation:

“I want to leave!” she shouted. “Can we leave?” she asked. “I was thinking…” she said. “What are you…?” she asked. “My name is—” she began.

Because after all, the dialogue is just the object in an O,SV sentence; the pronoun is still in the middle of the sentence. This may be salient by an example where we again treat the dialogue as an opaque box:

The wrong question, she asked.

It may be useful, therefore, to first look at your dialogue as though it doesn’t have question marks or exclamation points, and figure out all the periods and commas and requisite capitalization around that, then go and replace the commas and periods with question marks and exclamation points as needed.

Standalone Dialogue

I’ve been going on for a while about subjects, verbs, and objects, but I wanted to step back a moment and call attention to another sentence structure that uses dialogue. Namely, where the dialogue is the only thing in the sentence. This might happen in the situation where you have a lot of back-and-forth dialogue, so you don’t have to specify who’s talking each time. It might also occur within a paragraph—which I’ll get to shortly.

Ostensibly, when this happens, the sentence is actually a fragment:

“Hello, Jack. This is Alison.”

I’ve marked it as an object here because it’s somewhat implicitly the object of an “Alison said…” sentence:

Alison said, “Hello, Jack. This is Alison.”

Once you take this implicit dialogue tag out, the actual sentence itself consists of just a quote. Fragments are be generally discouraged by various authorities, but this is one of the exceptions, presumably on aesthetic grounds. In a way, the fact that it’s dialogue provides that implicit rest of the sentence, so we don’t need it if it’s understood who’s talking.²³

The punctuation around this isn’t tremendously special: just end the sentence as though it had “Someone said…” in front of it. Sometimes people get tripped up because these sentences are next to other narration, but you still need to treat them as separate sentences:

Alison laughed. “I slept fine.”

And I want to reinforce here, even though this example looks like a Subject-Verb-Object sentence, it is not. It is two sentences, the first of which has an intransitive verb (“laughed”). The second is a fragment that would be the object of a dialogue tag, but that part of the sentence has been dropped. Without that ellipsis, it looks like this:

Alison laughed. She said, “I slept fine.”

And as you can see, this sounds a little awkward. So we leave the dialogue tag out by convention.

It’s worth noting that if you switch the two sentences around, they remain two separate sentences:

“I slept fine.” Alison laughed.

And for the sake of completeness, I will also note that because these are two different sentences, you would capitalize the first word, such as if it were a pronoun:

“I slept fine.” She laughed.

This is not an example of the O,SV sentence structure; again, these are two separate sentences.

There is a bit further discussion of this later.

Parenthetical Phrases

Now we get to one of those tricky things: when we want narration to occur in the middle of dialogue. This is accomplished by what’s known as parenthesis. In English, there are three different ways to mark off a parenthesis, depending on how relevant the parenthetical information is to the main sentence. In order from most-relevant to least relevant, these are commas, em-dashes, or parentheses. These latter punctuation marks—( and )—are named such because they’re used to hold parenthetical phrases.²⁴

The key thing about parenthetical phrases is that if you drop them from the containing sentence, the sentence is still grammatically and semantically correct—which means it still means the same thing, even if less information is conveyed. As a non-dialogue example, you could have the sentence:

The boat, which was still broken, came into port.

And you can remove the parenthetical to say:

The boat came into port.

Same meaning, just with less information about the boat. And depending on how important that information is, it could have been separated out by em-dashes or parentheses.²⁵

So let’s look at what this looks like with dialogue.

Dialogue Tags

A very common thing writers do when one of their characters is going to talk for a long time is to have the character say something short, then narration indication who’s talking—such as with a dialogue tag—then continue the rest of the dialogue. And this sort of situation is where the “treat dialogue like an opaque box” idea kinda breaks down, because how you punctuate this sort of thing depends on the dialogue itself. Why? Because of whether it’s a parenthetical or just two sentences.

So what you need to do is look at the dialogue as though the dialogue tag wasn’t there and see what punctuation you use where. Let’s consider the following (admittedly very contrived) example:

“After landing, breathe deep. It's clean air.”

For the sake of the example, let’s look at the different places we could put the dialogue tag. We’ve already covered at the beginning:

She said, “After landing, breathe deep. It's clean air.”

And at the end:

“After landing, breathe deep. It's clean air,” she said.

There are two other natural breaks in the dialogue. The first is at the comma in the first sentence, the other between the two sentences. The former means the dialogue tag is a parenthetical; the latter means it is not, and the dialogue and its containing narration are broken into two sentences.

Let’s start with breaking at the comma. In this case, the dialogue tag is a parenthetical; this means that it should be separated from the dialogue with commas, as so:

“After landing,” she said, “breathe deep. It's clean air.”

Notice that this sentence still only has one object, it is just broken up into two pieces by the parenthetical. Notice also that because “breathe” is still in the middle of the spoken sentence, it is not capitalized.

This breaking up of the object into two parts can also happen if the parenthetical phrase contains more narration than just “she said”—such as if it said “she said, holding the intercom to her mouth” or something to that effect. However! Notice that there is still “said” in that phrase! If you don’t have an explicit dialogue tag then you are moving to a new sentence, as discussed earlier.

The other option is breaking at the period inside of the dialogue. In this case, we then break the whole narration into two sentences, one of which is of the O,SV form, and the other is of a fragment form:

“After landing, breathe deep,” she said. "It's clean air.”

Notice here that because we have two different sentences, there’s a period at the end of the dialogue tag, and the second sentence starts with a capital letter. This is just taking the things discussed before—complete sentences and standalone dialogue.

Actions During Dialogue

Sometimes, however, you want a character to do something while they’re talking—or for another character to react in the middle of the dialogue.

A straightforward way to do this is to literally just make it different sentences:

“After landing, breathe deep.” She smiled. “It's clean air.”

However, if you do this for other people acting in the middle of someone’s dialogue, it can sometimes get confusing about who’s talking, even if you’re following some of the guidance I talk about later around paragraph breaks. As well, it doesn’t work as well if you need to interrupt in the middle of a sentence, in a place where there isn’t a comma in the dialogue text.

This is another case where there’s a parenthetical, but because it’s breaking at someplace other than a comma in the dialogue, we need a different punctuation mark for it. And if you guessed “em-dash” for this, then you’re right:

“After landing, breathe”—she took a breath—“deep. It's clean air.”

There are two things of note here. The first is that the dialogue is capitalized as though it weren’t interrupted at all. The second is that the em-dashes go outside the quotation marks; this is because they interrupt the dialogue itself. This makes this distinctly different from someone being interrupted, because if this were acted out, the character would likely just say the entire dialogue line without an interruption, though possibly with a pause, as here. But in a situation where say, the parenthetical indicates that the speaker is pointing to something? Then clearly they would just keep talking:

“Get the ball there”—she pointed at the goal—“as quickly as we can.”

As a style note, I think it best to keep these sorts of parenthetical phrases in the middle of dialogue short and relatively uncommon. They can be useful for quick reactions or motion that needs to be immediately stated, but they can also get in the way of a reader following the flow of dialogue. Remember the first rule: the reader should understand what’s going on.

Words Other Than “Said”

So far, I’ve only been using “said” in my examples.²⁶ Realistically, it’s the verb you should be using most often for tagging dialogue—it’s relatively invisible to readers, and it doesn’t carry a whole lot of additional meaning. The dialogue itself should give you a good sense of how someone is talking, ideally.

However, there are times where you might want to use other words. Sometimes it’s important to note that someone whispers, or asks, or yells, or any of various other things. And it’s okay to use those words! But this is also where I see a lot of mistakes, because people will use “asked” and then punctuate it incorrectly; or more often, use a word that isn’t a synonym of “said” but punctuate it as though it were “said.”

If you’re trying to figure out how to punctuate this sort of thing, though, think of whether the word is a (close) synonym for “said.” Or put another way, if it makes sense for the dialogue to be the object of the verb you picked, then it’s punctuated just as “said” would be. Or again, more simply, could you replace your dialogue with the phrase “a question” or “a warning” and the sentence would still make sense? If so, then it’s a synonym for “said.”

“Are we there yet?” she asked. She asked, “Are we there yet?” She asked a question.

Note that the rules about question marks and exclamation points still apply:

“Watch out!” he yelled. He yelled, “Watch out!” He yelled a warning.

As do the rules about commas and periods:

“I love you,” she whispered. She whispered, “I love you.” She whispered a profession of love.

But if the verb you’re using can’t take “a question” or “a warning” or some other speech act as its object, then it needs to be part of a separate sentence. Note in all three of these triplets of sentences, above, it’s clear how the dialogue can be replaced with a noun description of the speech act, or that noun can be replaced with the text of the dialogue.

If your verb cannot, however, then it needs to be a separate sentence:

“I like cats.” She danced. “And I like dogs.”

This sort of thing—where you indicate who’s speaking by having them do something in a separate sentence—is sometimes called an action beat, and is different from a dialogue tag.

However, depending on the communication mechanism of your characters, some of these motion verbs might actually make sense as synonyms for “said,” simply by virtue of being the way things are communicated, mechanically speaking. For instance, if two characters are using sign language with each other, you might write:

“I love you,” she signed.

I would consider this correct even though “signed” typically isn’t used for speech acts.

Pseudo-synonyms

There are, however, some words that don’t strictly speaking take a speech act as an object, but will be written as though they do. Some examples of this would be “interrupted,” “wondered,” and “agreed.” These are, to my knowledge, relatively uncontroversial to use as a synonym for said:

“That's not my name,” she interrupted.

But for instance, “interrupted” typically takes as a direct object the thing being interrupted. The thing interrupting is an indirect object, typically with “with,” as in this example:

Alison interrupted the game with an air horn.

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules around this that I’m aware of. My sense is that in cases where the verb takes “with” as the preposition for its indirect object, you can sometimes drop the “with” and replace the indirect object with a direct quote—but I’m sure there are exceptions to this.

Going a little further afield, however, there are some words that don’t typically take a speech act as an object, but sometimes crop up in narrative as acting like they do. Some examples are “smiled,” “breathed,” and “chuckled.” The usual advice is to actually avoid these words, because you can’t strictly speaking “smile” a question or “breathe” an answer, but they can also be verbs that provide evocative imagery when used. My advice is to use these with caution.

In general, there are various non-speech words that are sometimes used as speech words, and there’s kind of a continuum of how acceptable they each are—for example, I think “breathed” makes more sense than “smiled”—but it very much depends on your venue.

Nested Speech

So far, I’ve been using double quotation marks—“ and ”—for marking quotations, as is the United States custom. However, in some parts of the United Kingdom, single quotation marks—‘ and ’—are the preference.²⁷

One of the things I often see is people using double quotation marks for dialogue, and single quotation marks for other words and things that are quoted in the text. I understand the impulse—dialogue and “sarcasm quotes” feel different—but CMOS at least is clear that you should just use double quotation marks for all of them:

“Hello,” said the “wonderful” wizard, pointing at a sign that read “No Smoking” in big black letters.

There is, however, a situation where you do have single and double quotation marks next to each other: when something being quoted (such as dialogue) has a quote inside of it. In which case, the quote-within-a-quote uses single quotation marks. If you then have a quote within that quote-within-a-quote, you go back to double quotation marks, and then to single, and so on. And here’s the thing: if you’re in the UK style, starting with single quotes, then you still follow this pattern of single, double, single, double, and so on; you’re just starting from somewhere else.

This, of course, raises the question of punctuating a quote-within-a-quote, especially given our rules above about commas and periods and all of that. This is—in my opinion—one of the places where logical punctuation really shines, because it’s much more straightforward: if the punctuation is part of the quoted text, you put it in the quote, otherwise outside of the quote. So for instance:

Alice said, “Rachel told me ‘this’.”

And the rule remains that if you would put punctuation both inside and outside a quote, inside wins. It can now just win across multiple quotation marks:

Alice said, “Rachel said, ‘I’m sick.’”

And this holds with sentence fragments being the quote-within-a-quote, as in the earlier example, when following typesetters’ punctuation:

Alice said, “Rachel told me ‘this.’”

Though this example is a little tricky because the inner fragment could be punctuated as a complete sentence.

In either case, a good way to think about handling nested quotes like this is as a series of opaque boxes. You start with the innermost quotation, and then treat it as an opaque box as you move up a level to the second-most-innermost quotation, and punctuate appropriately within the context of that text without consider the fact that it’s a quotation. Then you move a level up and repeat, and again, until you reach the uppermost level. And remember that if you would have both an inner and an outer, inner wins.

There are some weird corner cases, though, when you get to things like question marks:

“Rachel asked, ‘Are you sick?’,” Alison said.

So remember, anything other than a comma or period is treated as logical punctuation in these scenarios. That is, if it’s part of the quoted material, it’s inside the quotation marks, and if it’s not part of the quoted material, it’s outside the quotation marks. For example:

“Did Rachel say, ‘I’m sick’?” Alison asked.

Note here that the question mark—which is part of what Alison said, not what Rachel said—ends up winning over the period that would be inside of what Rachel said, because there’s still the rule not to have punctuation both inside and outside of a quotation mark. Unless, of course, it makes sense to:

“Did Rachel ask, ‘Are you sick?’?” Alison asked.

The number of possibilities and combinations here can be quite dizzying, and there’s probably subtle contradictions in the rules of most style guides. Personally, I would suggest writing dialogue that doesn’t get quite this complicated—but if you do, be consistent with how you punctuate things.

One final typography note: if you have a single quotation mark and a double quotation mark together, such as at the end of a sentence, it is fine to put a space between them for readability. Just make sure it’s a nonbreaking space, so you don’t end up with the double quotation mark on a separate line.

Paragraphs

At this point, I’ve largely been working with relatively simple setups: one person talking, with little to say. However, this can get quite boring, if your characters don’t have much to say, and don’t talk with each other! To accomplish either of these, however, we’re going to need to introduce paragraph breaks.

Multiple Speakers

The key thing to keep in mind if you have multiple speakers in a conversation is the first rule: make sure the reader understands what’s going on. That means the reader should generally always be able to tell who’s talking in any given piece of dialogue, with allowance given for O,SV sentence structure and the like.

The primary rule of thumb for this is that you should never have two people’s dialogue within the same paragraph²⁸. What this usually means in practice is that you use a paragraph break to denote a change in speaker:

Alison said, “Hello there.”

“Greetings.” Jack waved.

Personally, I like thinking of it as “turn-taking”, where each paragraph indicates a single character’s “turn” in the conversation, so I will also put nonverbal responses in their own paragraph:

Alison said, “Hello there.”

Jack waved.

“I hope you're doing well.”

With something like this, you can more easily count through paragraphs to see whose “turn” it is, and that can help identify dialogue if you don’t include dialogue tags all the time.

However, this is just a personal preference thing, because I think it’s much easier for a reader to follow: find the dialogue tag or action tag in a paragraph, or count alternating back until you find a paragraph with one, and you can tell who’s talking or acting. This also to some extent applies if you have more than two people: by keeping turns going, you can clearly delineate boundaries between each character’s actions.

This does mean that dialogue can be broke up by actions, potentially multiple times:

Alison said, “Hello.” She narrowed her eyes. “Are you a mouse?” With a palm extended, she reached for the creature. “I hope you're okay.”

That said, doing this too much will make it hard to read for other reasons.

There are some style guides that apparently disagree with this, though, and are more likely to put paragraph breaks before any dialogue, even if it’s continuing the same person’s “turn”:

“There are two apples left.” Alison smiled at the children asking for food, considering what to say.

“You'll have to split them somehow.”

Personally, I don’t like this, because it can sometimes make it more difficult to figure out who said a piece of dialogue. Your mileage may vary, but remember: the reader should be able to tell who’s talking.

Long Dialogue

Sometimes characters talk for a long time. So long, in fact, that their speech ends up being multiple paragraphs in itself! Personally, I dislike doing this, and prefer to include narration around how the speaker is moving during their speech, or how the audience is reacting. But, sometimes it cannot be helped.

When you do this, you still treat the dialogue like an opaque box, as before, and punctuate it relative to the surrounding narration accordingly. But internal to the dialogue, each paragraph starts with an opening quotation mark, but only the last paragraph ends with a closing quotation mark:

She walked up the podium, then began to speak. “My fellow students, today we have born the brunt of too many rules of grammar, style, and orthography. I say we break off the shackles of rules and guides, and pave a new path!

“This new path will be one of grandeur and splendor, bereft of stuffy organizations telling us what to do!

“Now, who's with me?”

Block Quotes

Sometimes what you’re quoting is just very long: a full speech, or a letter, or something to that effect. For this, there’s another sort of typographic convention that is equivalent to a quotation mark in terms of signifying quotation, but is not punctuation per se. This is the block quotation or block quote, which can be rendered in a variety of means, though generally is indented, frequently is italicized, and often has a smaller font size or line height. Treat everything inside a block quote as being quoted when it comes to punctuation outside of the quote, but you can ignore the comma-instead-of-period rule for the end of the quote. As well, if you have quotes nested in your block quote, start with double quotation marks inside the block quote—or single quotation marks, in the UK style.

The letter said,

Dear Martha,

Today I went to the store. I told the cashier, “I’m sick.” But she didn't pay attention to me!

I threw it away.

You do not need to add or remove additional italics from the way a block quote is rendered. If the formatting is “block quotes are italicized,” you don’t need to apply italics yourself; and if the formatting is not “block quotes are italicized,” then trust that the other formatting—indenting and so on—will also indicate that it’s a block quote, and don’t apply additional italics.²⁹

Outside of Quotation Marks

There are a few cases where you do quotation—or something akin to it—but don’t use quotation marks per se. I think it’s worth covering those as well.

Thoughts

Quotations work great for dialogue, but what about when someone is thinking? That is, for characters that have internal narrators,³⁰ how do you represent that internal narration?

There are, in my estimation, two ways of accomplishing this.³¹

The first, and most common these days, is to use italics:

I’m sick, Alison thought.

This comes, I think, from the fact that an alternate way of making the use–mention distinction in a text is to italicize words that are being mentioned rather than used. This, to some extent, makes italicizing text equivalent to putting quotation marks around it.

And with thoughts that you’re doing italics for, you should punctuate it exactly as though it was dialogue. Notice, for instance, that I ended Alison’s thoughts with a comma in the previous example—and the comma is also italicized, because it’s part of the quote. And if you introduce a thought with narration, or have a parenthetical narration inside of a thought, you follow the rules exactly as with quotation marks, but italicizing things instead:

If I go now, Alison thought, then I’ll be early.

The other major way is to just use quotation marks exactly like speech, but with a verb that indicates it’s thought instead of said:

“If I go now,” Alison thought, “then I’ll be early.”

In these cases, I would consider “thought” to be a pseudo-synonym of “said”.

Nonstandard Quotation Marks

There are times when you may want to indicate a different mode of speech differently from verbal speech. This is commonly telepathy from my observation, but can also be potentially trying to indicate dialogue in different languages or some other modulation.

In these cases, pick a bracketing character that makes sense and you like—I recommend ones that have clear open and close characters, similar to double quotation marks—and use those exactly like you would quotation marks. For example, I’ve found that angle brackets—< and >—are relatively popular for telepathy,³² but you really can pick whatever you like.

<If you go now,> Alison said, <you’ll be lost.>

I have occasionally seen italics—such as used in thoughts—for telepathy or shared-brain experiences. I personally don’t like this because of the conflation with thoughts, and I prefer to keep it more distinct. Just be consistent and thoughtful about what you pick.

Note also that the convention with nonstandard quotation marks is to treat them exactly like double quotation marks, and to use the same sorts of verbs—said, asked, and so on—with them after the convention of what they mean is established.

Indirect Dialogue

Sometimes you don’t actually want to directly quote someone, and instead just paraphrase what they say.³³ This is called indirect discourse, as opposed to direct discourse, as in direct quotes. It is not punctuated with any quotation marks, and otherwise, just pay attention to sentences when deciding whether or not to capitalize things.

Alison suggested it was possible for someone to come down to help her and further requested Rachel and Martha by name.

Conclusion

I realize this is a lot of information, mostly because there are a lot of different situations that dialogue can have. However, I think a lot of it can really be boiled down to one piece of advice: pay attention to where your sentence boundaries are. That’ll get you really far, and having a style guide or other reference (such as this post!) for the other scenarios can cover the rest.

I could also summarize advice from this post down to:

• Think about the actual sentences at play, treating the quoted dialogue as a “box” that you can’t see inside of. One way to do this is pretend it just says “the question” instead of the directly quoted words.

• If the quoted dialogue is the object of a verb, use commas; otherwise, use periods. Question marks and exclamation points “override” commas and periods.

• Parenthetical phrases that break up dialogue are punctuated appropriate to how parenthetical they are.

• If you break the rules with nonstandard verbs or punctuation, still follow the other rules as closely as you can.

• Make sure the reader can follow what’s going on.

There are, of course, exceptions to all of these rules—and places where it might make sense to break the rules further for effect. Above all, I think the core thing to do is (as with all writing) have a reasonably consistent set of rules to follow, and to then follow them as consistently as you can. The rest will sort itself out.

I do hope this blog post helps clear up some confusion about a lot of things around dialogue. As I said earlier, though, if there are errors I’ve made here—or other cases that I didn’t cover, or anything else of that nature—please do let me know so I can make the appropriate changes.

Much thanks to Stick, Wiz, Zach, and Scidra for looking over earlier versions of this blog post and providing feedback.

1. Unless you’re actively trying to obfuscate it for some reason or another. But there’s a difference between obfuscating things intentionally and having writing that’s accidentally unclear as to what’s going on. ↩

2. Circularly, a clause is usually defined as a subject and a predicate. In simple cases, a sentence consists of a single clause, but more complex sentences have multiple clauses. This is where things like independent clause and dependent clause crop up, but I feel like delving into those is a topic for another blog post. ↩

3. This is, for good or for ill, a relatively simplified explanation of things. There’s a lot more nuance here, especially once you start getting into more complicated sentences and clauses. However, all that is orthogonal to the point I want to make in terms of how English sentence structure drives dialogue formatting, so I’m going to ignore it for the time being. ↩

4. Note that these are not necessarily words but can be phrases—for example, “log in” is a phrasal verb and would as a unit be considered the verb. Likewise “the red ball” is a noun phrase that would itself be the object, even though it is multiple words. ↩

5. I’ve tried to avoid saying “the subject is the one who does the verb” because that’s actually the agent, and the thing the verb is done to is the patient. This distinction matters in passive sentences: in “My car was hit by the ball”, the subject is “my car” but the agent is “the ball”. Furthermore, a topic is what a sentence is about, and the focus is the stuff about the topic. These are all distinctions that arise from trying to generalize grammatical things across a multitude of languages with sometimes radically different structures. And I haven’t even gotten into ergative–absolutive languages! For our purposes, however, “subject” and “object” are good enough. ↩

6. The most obvious example is that to form questions, we invert the verb and the subject—but only with the auxiliary verb, to the point where we have to add it if it wasn’t there already. So if we want to turn “Alison greeted Carol” into a question, we first add an auxiliary verb to make it “Alison did greet Carol” and then invert the auxiliary verb and subject to make “Did Alison greet Carol?” This is called subject–auxiliary inversion, appropriately enough. There are a few other cases of subject-verb inversion that aren’t that, though. ↩

7. I have also heard British people call these “inverted commas.” ↩

8. Naturally, before I’ve discussed nested quotations, I have a case where I have to quote a quoted thing! This use–meaning distinction gains another level! I decided to go with a monospace font here as a result, but will touch on it more in the nested quotations section. ↩

9. Interestingly, I can’t really find much reference that this is what it’s called beyond Wikipedia and a few random forums. However, since I don’t want to call them the “British” and “American” styles (as they’re sometimes referred to), and I lack a better term, I’ll continue to use “typesetters’ punctuation” here. ↩

10. CMOS posted an article on CMOS Shop Talk recently that dug into the history of these distinctions, and why the styles are different between the US and the UK. ↩

11. Of course, there’s an obvious exception to this with technical manuals, since the period inside of the quote has actual meaning, and therefore can’t act as the end of a sentence. In practice, this doesn’t come up very often in my experience, and technical books where such things matter usually do additional special typesetting (typically with monospaced fonts) that makes the distinction more clear. ↩

12. This also seems to happen in indirect conversations. Consider the sentence “What I want to know is, Where is the kitchen?” as an example. See CMOS §6.45 for a bit more discussion. ↩

13. In §12.15, CMOS makes a distinction between whether the quotation forms a “syntactical part” of the surrounding sentence, and provides some examples. I recommend looking there for more information. ↩

14. See CMOS §12.16 for more information. ↩

15. There are a number of different terms for it, but the one I prefer is “dialogue tag,” so that is the one I will be using here. ↩

16. The term for this is topicalization, where the standard sentence structure is disrupted to put something that gets emphasis at the front. The actual process is known as fronting. ↩

17. This is shifting in casual typed English to actually indicate a rising intonation, which while usually associated with a question does not always mean that. As well, sometimes questions will be punctuated with a period if they are “more of a statement”. It’s currently in flux, though I personally fall into the “rising intonation” camp. ↩

18. In §12.43, which has several good examples. ↩

19. This is a change as of CMOS 18. In CMOS 17, it would still require the comma. It is not incorrect to use one, just be consistent. ↩

20. In a discussion about this, a fellow writer once noted to me that the use of ellipses in nonstandard locations like this—or an entire dialogue quote that is just an ellipsis—is probably due to the influence of manga and graphic novels. In a visual medium like that—which lacks a textual narrator—pauses need an additional way to indicate they occur, and the ellipsis seems to have been the option of choice in English. TV Tropes calls this Visual Silence. Unless you’re writing manga or a graphic novel, don’t do it—just indicate the silence or the hesitation in the narration. ↩

21. Most people confuse the hyphen (-), en-dash (–), and em-dash (—), because the distinction historically was the purview of typographers. In short, hyphens are for stuttering, some word compounds (e.g. “cost-effective”), and phrasal adjectives (“listener-supported radio”); en-dashes are used for number ranges; and em-dashes are used for parenthesis and interruption, as discussed here. You can find more discussion on this, including how to reproduce them with your computer, in Matthew Butterick’s excellent Practical Typography. ↩

22. With the obvious exception that “I” is always capitalized. ↩

23. I believe this is typically known as ellipsis. ↩

24. In the United States, at least. I believe in the United Kingdom these marks are called “brackets,” and what we call “brackets” in the US—[ and ]—are known as “square brackets” in the UK. Wikipedia has more information. ↩

25. One of my English teachers in high school told us to never use parentheses (the punctuation mark) in essays, because if the information is so irrelevant it can be relegated to that distant a parenthetical, then it’s not worth including. Either pull it out and make it part of the text or don’t include it at all. I’ve tried to shake this ever since, though I think for nonfiction writing it’s a reasonable rule of thumb. Your mileage may vary. ↩

26. Technically, I’m using “to say” in the past tense in these sentences. The same advice and rules apply in present tense or other tenses, mutatis mutandis. ↩

27. I’m ignoring for the time being the difference between curly quotes and straight quotes, because that’s a purely typographical matter. I personally prefer curly quotes because I think they look better, but really, the rule is to be consistent. Matthew Butterick has more detail on the typographical aspect. ↩

28. The one exception is if both characters say the same thing at the same time, or are both exclaiming short things at the same time as each other. This is to be done sparingly, in my opinion. ↩

29. Despite the way they’re currently styled on this website, I don’t like italics in block quotes. It makes them so much harder to read, and other format signifiers, such as the additional indent, are already sufficient in my mind. Your mileage may vary, especially if you don’t have control over the formatting style guide, just be thoughtful—that you’re marking it as a block quote is the important part. ↩

30. Not having this is starting to be called anendophasia, though a significant portion of the population does not have an internal monologue. I’m not fond of pathologizing people who don’t have one through this creation of a term, despite being someone who has an inner monologue, but that’s where things stand in the medical research right now. ↩

31. CMOS covers this very briefly in §12.49, but it’s not well-defined otherwise. There are some other CMOS articles that touch on it, as well, but the real answer is to be consistent. Other styles are also discussed there, but I don’t see them very often, and I personally don’t care for them, but your mileage may vary. ↩

32. Or maybe I’m sample-biased because this is what the Animorphs series did, and I read a lot of those growing up. ↩

33. With certain levels of paraphrasing. I’ve read indirect discourse that was almost exactly what the direct discourse would have been, and it was fine. ↩