i think if you have a crush on someone that isnt into you the same way you should be able to throw up horrible black goo for about 10 minutes to make the crush go away
Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):
“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.
“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.
“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.
“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”
“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”
“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.
“If you want to break up dialogue to insert an action"—she gesticulated wildly to emphasize her point—"then you use em dashes around the action.”
“You can also break up dialogue by placing the em dash inside the quotation mark, but—” She took a moment to catch her breath. “—you must treat the action like a sentence. It must be capitalized with an end punctation.”
“When humans speak, we often get sidetracked (and share information that may not be all that pertinent, a secret, or something we probably shouldn’t be talking about). Use parenthesis in your dialogue when you want to demonstrate this.”
***
“If you’re writing a long monologue, then it likely needs to be broken into multiple paragraphs. Because one long paragraph of dialogue that takes up an entire page or multiple pages is very hard on the eyes.
“So conclude the previous dialogue paragraph without a quotation mark, and start the next dialogue paragraph with a quotation mark. This shows the reader that the same person is still speaking, without the need for additional action or dialogue tags.”
