Why Do So Many Amateur Writers Punctuate Quotes All Wrong?
Sorry, but readers won’t forgive your dialogue mistakes.
I am one of many judges for the first round of a short story contest, so I read lots of amateur writers’ work, and I see lots of them making the same mistakes.
Lots of common mistakes, I completely understand making. Who among us hasn’t used a flimsy adjective or adverb in an attempt to provide specificity, before figuring out that it usually does the opposite? Who hasn’t picked a fancy word for the sake of variety that ends up bothering readers like a baseball under the mattress? Who hasn’t weakened their work with a cliché or plot inconsistency every now and then?
I certainly have. I’ve been guilty of all these writerly transgressions and more. These are issues you can’t fix by searching the internet for what is “correct.” There is no one “correct” solution.
But an error I find all too often that does have a correct solution is not punctuating dialogue correctly. And that, there’s no excuse for.
A Quick Rundown on How to Punctuate Dialogue Correctly
I’m not going to tell you how to correctly punctuate every dialogue eccentricity, but I will tell you what you need to know to get it right most of the time.
When a character says a complete sentence out loud, followed by a dialogue tag, you end their quote with a comma, then the end quote, then the tag. I see people writing something like:
**WRONG WAY**
“I’m going to the store.” said John. “Want anything?”
Don’t do that. A period will be assumed at the end of a bit of dialogue. The correct punctuation is:
**RIGHT WAY**
“I’m going to the store,” said John. “Want anything?”
Make sure you place that comma inside the quotation mark.
If the bit of dialogue ends with a question mark or exclamation point, put that inside the end quote, but that doesn’t mean your sentence is necessarily over. If a dialogue tag follows, it doesn’t get capitalized unless its a proper name.
**WRONG WAY**
“Are you going to the store?” Said John. “I’d like to come with you.”
**RIGHT WAY**
“Are you going to the store?” said John. “I’d like to come with you.”
This is all you need to know to punctuate the vast majority of your quotations correctly. Sure, there are some more-tricky bits of dialogue to get right. I struggled for a long time before deciding how I would punctuate a line in this story:
“Is this your baby? I never knew you to — ” she couldn’t say the words “ — with a man.”
But ultimately I got it into a state I wasn’t ashamed to share with the world. Most dialogue is far easier than that to get right.
This is a Worse Error Than Others
There are a number of reasons that failing to punctuate your dialogue correctly is, in my opinion, worse than other punctuation issues.
Here’s why:
- If you read books more often, you’d know how quotes look. I recall being in elementary school when I first puzzled this out. I read lots of books and learned common standards from them. Other types of punctuation are more iffy. It’s easy to misplace a comma, in part because a comma is a flexible creature, often used for artistic effect, or to add rhythm in a way that might be “wrong” in one context and right in another. Em dashes, semi-colons, colons: these are all tricky tools. Five editors might have five different interpretations as to which one to use where. But they’ll all agree about the punctuation of simple dialogue.
- Readers notice it because it looks weird. The thing about readers is, they tend to read a lot. For that reason, the weirdness of people’s dialogue punctuation errors stands out to them. It can downright stop a person short to have a sentence seem to end, then get followed by a dialogue tag.
- You can Google it and you shouldn’t be lazy. Google won’t tell you whether or not you’ve got too much backstory. It won’t tell you if a bit of your story feels too “tell-y” instead of “show-y.” It won’t tell you if an em dash or semi-colon is the better tool for your specific sentence. But you can search for dialogue punctuation rules and easily apply them to your work, so why didn’t you?
This is an Easy Fix, So Fix It
There’s no reason I can think of to continue messing up your dialogue punctuation. Do you want to be a writer, or no?
There are writers out there who say crap like, “That’s what editors are for.” And, sure, editors will fix your mistakes, but don’t you want to, like, learn how to do it correctly and not need an editor to make you look good? Is it really that hard?
Besides, when serious readers (who, by definition, read a lot) see such mistakes, they don’t trust you, in part because they can tell that you’re probably not much of a reader yourself. Readers hate that, and for good reason — because the work of someone who doesn’t read tends to be amateurish on every level.
So don’t be lazy. Google it, learn how to do it right, and make sure you fix your errors before sending your work out into the world.
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