Dialogue/Conversation
If you're asked to write a dialogue then you are recording in writing spoken language. You'll need to write in a much less formal style than many of the other forms (e.g. the report). A dialogue is an equal conversation between two people (both should speak for about the same amount of time).
2. He said, “After breakfast tomorrow morning we will have to leave early to catch the train.”RULE: There is a comma AFTER the ‘saying verb’ (e.g. He said), and BEFORE the inverted commas. The dialogue (spoken sentence) begins with a capital letter.
3. “After breakfast tomorrow morning we will have to leave early to catch the train,” he said.RULE: If the ‘saying verb’ comes after the dialogue, we place a comma at the end of the dialogue. We use a small letter for the “saying verb’ after the dialogue (‘he’ NOT ‘He’).
4. “After breakfast tomorrow morning,” he said, ” we will have to leave early to catch the train.”RULE: If the ‘saying verb’ interrupts the dialogue, then it is punctuated as above. We use a small letter for the ‘saying verb’. And the second dialogues (which is a continuation of the first) begins with small letter.
5. “We must get up early tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve a train to catch.”RULE: The above example has two dialogues (each dialogue is a complete sentence) Small letter for the saying verb.Second dialogue begins with a capital letter.
6. “We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?”Ralph nodded.“Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?”“Only two. And they’ve gone.”“Two? Killed?”Ralph nodded again.The officer knew, as a rule, when people were telling the truth. He whistled softly.RULE: Each speaker is given a new paragraph, no matter how long or short his or her speech may be.RULE: Start a new paragraph when you switch from the narrative tract to the dialogue and vice versa. (Note: If the narrative tract after the dialogue is about the same speaker of the dialogue, there is usually no need for a new paragraph.)RULE: Use block form: leave a line blank between paragraphs (speakers).RULE: Open and close inverted commas only at the beginning and end of the spoken words, even if the speaker talks for the length of a whole paragraph!
7. That was such a frivolous outfit, I thought to myself VS “That is such a frivolous outfit,” I thought to myself.
8. Oh great, Mrs Siew had to ruin my afternoon by appearing at the door with that obnoxious brat of hers, I muttered to myself. VS “Oh great, Mrs Siew has to ruin my afternoon by appearing at the door with that obnoxious brat of hers,” I muttered to myself.RULE: When writing in the 1st person, your readers hear your thoughts. Therefore you do not need to punctuate your thoughts. You also do not need to punctuate “things” which you say to yourself.
Example Conversation
Topic: Should domestic cats be eradicated?
Emine Saner: Do you think owning a cat should be made more difficult?
Tom Cox: All cats should be chipped. A cat licence could work, definitely.
Emine Saner: The study in the US published this week showed stray and feral cats were the bigger problem than domestic cats, although these contributed to the killing of birds and mammals, too. Gareth, are you concerned about domestic cats as well?
Gareth Morgan: For me, it’s all cats. I would love New Zealand to have no predators at all. Well, that’s a bit extreme – what I mean is no non-confined predators. I’m fine with dogs on leashes. I’m happy with cats as long as they’re confined. Our cat population is exploding, and it is ferals and strays who are free to roam.
Tom Cox: It’s that question about what nature is. You could say it’s not natural for cats to be here killing so many birds, but that’s part of nature in itself – the fact that, however many thousands of years ago, we realised cats were good at hunting rats and mice, and it’s evolved into this thing where they’re now wonderful companions to people. It’s part of the question of what is natural.
Emine Saner: Cats are responsible for the deaths of wildlife all over the world. Do you think other countries should consider getting rid of their cats?
Gareth Morgan: That’s not for me to say. That’s a national conversation. I did this to spark the national conversation in New Zealand – I didn’t expect it to go all around the world.The problem is that you get swamped with the numbers of cats, that’s the issue. Let me put this another way – we do this with stray dogs, but not with cats. Why the discrimination? I think it comes down to the strength of the cat lobby.
Tom Cox: There’s the cliche of the crazy cat lady, and people who don’t like cats say cat-lovers are weirdos. That’s not true – cat lovers are mostly people with a lot of compassion, but there is a minuscule percentage of people who are a little bit over-the-top about cats. I imagine that would be a challenge you might face, Gareth. Have you ever had a cat?
Gareth Morgan: Absolutely. We have cats in the family now – my daughter has one. But it is confined, and that’s the issue, really.
Emine Saner: Could you see a point where cats become indoor-only pets?
Tom Cox: That’s never the way I’ve lived with cats, apart from a short period when I lived in a flat in London. I didn’t feel they were happy. Sometimes I feel, when I meet some people’s indoor cats, they seem a bit dopey, like they’re not properly having the life they should.
Gareth Morgan: I suppose I’d put it another way: do we wait until all our endemic species are extinct and then wonder what we’ve done? That’s up for the public to decide. There is a trade-off here. I’m asking for them to be confined. We’re at a tipping point in New Zealand. We have the highest rate of cat-ownership in the world – 48% of households have one or more cats. It’s a different situation elsewhere, which is why I’m reluctant to translate the New Zealand experience anywhere else. What I’m advocating, policy-wise, for local councils is to trap wandering cats, and if they’re chipped, they go back to the owner. Whether they fine the owner or not – that’s none of my business. I’m not talking about any euthanasia of owned cats.
Emine Saner: But you have said that people shouldn’t replace their cats when they die naturally?
Gareth Morgan: There are people who would find it far too hard to confine them, either physically, or they wouldn’t feel right about it. In those instances, I’m saying make this cat your last, because you owe it to the New Zealand fauna not to let your cat roam.
If you're asked to write a dialogue then you are recording in writing spoken language. You'll need to write in a much less formal style than many of the other forms (e.g. the report). A dialogue is an equal conversation between two people (both should speak for about the same amount of time).
Dialogue Do's and Don’ts
Good dialogue can be tricky. It needs to move the story forward and reveal important character information without seeming artificial. It needs to seem realistic without actually being realistic.
Confused? Let’s break it down. Here are some things good dialogue should do:
- It should follow some simple grammatical rules. Dialogue should be enclosed within quotation marks. Each new line of dialogue is indented, and a new paragraph should be started every time a new person is speaking.
- It should be concise. Long, wordy passages of dialogue might seem like a good way to get information across, but they can be tedious for the reader.
- It should communicate character information. Good dialogue lets the reader know something about the person speaking it.
- It should be broken up with action. People don’t typically stop everything when they talk. They fidget. They keep washing the dishes. They pace. Don’t forget that your characters aren’t static.
- Don’t get too crazy with dialogue tags. Usually, a few well-placed “he said” or “she replied” will do the trick. If your dialogue is well-written, it should be clear who is speaking, even without the tags.
- Don’t go overboard with backstory. You should never use dialogue to tell the readers things your characters already know.
- Don’t use too much dialogue. Your readers don’t need to know everything your characters say, word-for-word. Dialogue should be chosen carefully.
- Don’t try to be too realistic. Our actual speech wouldn’t make great dialogue. We say “um” and “uh” a lot. We trail off in the middle of sentences. We change subjects without warning. Good dialogue should approximate real speech, not mimic it.
To give you an example of what dialogue should look like here’s the opening of a short story, titled Me:
“What do we do now?”
Shadows from the single candle flickered on Heather’s face. It masked the basement smell with green apple. She rolled her eyes at me.
“Nothing, Kristy. Just wait.”
I sighed. I was sick of waiting. My arms, and my butt, were starting to hurt. I drummed my fingers impatiently on the plastic pointer thingy.
“Stop it,” Heather hissed. “You’ll make them mad.”
“Make who mad?”
“The spirits, stupid.”
Right. The spirits. Like I really believed the spirits were going to talk to us on a piece of Parker Brothers cardboard.
EIGHT EXAMPLES OF PUNCTUATED DIALOGUE.
1. “After breakfast tomorrow morning we will have to leave early to catch the train.”RULE: The spoken words and the punctuation go inside the inverted commas.2. He said, “After breakfast tomorrow morning we will have to leave early to catch the train.”RULE: There is a comma AFTER the ‘saying verb’ (e.g. He said), and BEFORE the inverted commas. The dialogue (spoken sentence) begins with a capital letter.
3. “After breakfast tomorrow morning we will have to leave early to catch the train,” he said.RULE: If the ‘saying verb’ comes after the dialogue, we place a comma at the end of the dialogue. We use a small letter for the “saying verb’ after the dialogue (‘he’ NOT ‘He’).
4. “After breakfast tomorrow morning,” he said, ” we will have to leave early to catch the train.”RULE: If the ‘saying verb’ interrupts the dialogue, then it is punctuated as above. We use a small letter for the ‘saying verb’. And the second dialogues (which is a continuation of the first) begins with small letter.
5. “We must get up early tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve a train to catch.”RULE: The above example has two dialogues (each dialogue is a complete sentence) Small letter for the saying verb.Second dialogue begins with a capital letter.
6. “We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?”Ralph nodded.“Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?”“Only two. And they’ve gone.”“Two? Killed?”Ralph nodded again.The officer knew, as a rule, when people were telling the truth. He whistled softly.RULE: Each speaker is given a new paragraph, no matter how long or short his or her speech may be.RULE: Start a new paragraph when you switch from the narrative tract to the dialogue and vice versa. (Note: If the narrative tract after the dialogue is about the same speaker of the dialogue, there is usually no need for a new paragraph.)RULE: Use block form: leave a line blank between paragraphs (speakers).RULE: Open and close inverted commas only at the beginning and end of the spoken words, even if the speaker talks for the length of a whole paragraph!
7. That was such a frivolous outfit, I thought to myself VS “That is such a frivolous outfit,” I thought to myself.
8. Oh great, Mrs Siew had to ruin my afternoon by appearing at the door with that obnoxious brat of hers, I muttered to myself. VS “Oh great, Mrs Siew has to ruin my afternoon by appearing at the door with that obnoxious brat of hers,” I muttered to myself.RULE: When writing in the 1st person, your readers hear your thoughts. Therefore you do not need to punctuate your thoughts. You also do not need to punctuate “things” which you say to yourself.
Example Conversation
Topic: Should domestic cats be eradicated?
Emine Saner: Do you think owning a cat should be made more difficult?
Tom Cox: All cats should be chipped. A cat licence could work, definitely.
Emine Saner: The study in the US published this week showed stray and feral cats were the bigger problem than domestic cats, although these contributed to the killing of birds and mammals, too. Gareth, are you concerned about domestic cats as well?
Gareth Morgan: For me, it’s all cats. I would love New Zealand to have no predators at all. Well, that’s a bit extreme – what I mean is no non-confined predators. I’m fine with dogs on leashes. I’m happy with cats as long as they’re confined. Our cat population is exploding, and it is ferals and strays who are free to roam.
Tom Cox: It’s that question about what nature is. You could say it’s not natural for cats to be here killing so many birds, but that’s part of nature in itself – the fact that, however many thousands of years ago, we realised cats were good at hunting rats and mice, and it’s evolved into this thing where they’re now wonderful companions to people. It’s part of the question of what is natural.
Emine Saner: Cats are responsible for the deaths of wildlife all over the world. Do you think other countries should consider getting rid of their cats?
Gareth Morgan: That’s not for me to say. That’s a national conversation. I did this to spark the national conversation in New Zealand – I didn’t expect it to go all around the world.The problem is that you get swamped with the numbers of cats, that’s the issue. Let me put this another way – we do this with stray dogs, but not with cats. Why the discrimination? I think it comes down to the strength of the cat lobby.
Tom Cox: There’s the cliche of the crazy cat lady, and people who don’t like cats say cat-lovers are weirdos. That’s not true – cat lovers are mostly people with a lot of compassion, but there is a minuscule percentage of people who are a little bit over-the-top about cats. I imagine that would be a challenge you might face, Gareth. Have you ever had a cat?
Gareth Morgan: Absolutely. We have cats in the family now – my daughter has one. But it is confined, and that’s the issue, really.
Emine Saner: Could you see a point where cats become indoor-only pets?
Tom Cox: That’s never the way I’ve lived with cats, apart from a short period when I lived in a flat in London. I didn’t feel they were happy. Sometimes I feel, when I meet some people’s indoor cats, they seem a bit dopey, like they’re not properly having the life they should.
Gareth Morgan: I suppose I’d put it another way: do we wait until all our endemic species are extinct and then wonder what we’ve done? That’s up for the public to decide. There is a trade-off here. I’m asking for them to be confined. We’re at a tipping point in New Zealand. We have the highest rate of cat-ownership in the world – 48% of households have one or more cats. It’s a different situation elsewhere, which is why I’m reluctant to translate the New Zealand experience anywhere else. What I’m advocating, policy-wise, for local councils is to trap wandering cats, and if they’re chipped, they go back to the owner. Whether they fine the owner or not – that’s none of my business. I’m not talking about any euthanasia of owned cats.
Emine Saner: But you have said that people shouldn’t replace their cats when they die naturally?
Gareth Morgan: There are people who would find it far too hard to confine them, either physically, or they wouldn’t feel right about it. In those instances, I’m saying make this cat your last, because you owe it to the New Zealand fauna not to let your cat roam.
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