How to Write
Quotations
Introduction
After many chapters, we finally get to one of the best parts about writing: the dialogue! I personally love writing dialogue, it’s one of the best way to show your reader instead of telling them, and oftentimes the hardest thing to do in writing is show! We’ll focus mostly on dialogue in this chapter, however, there are a couple other things that quotation marks are used for and so we’ll touch on those as well!
Dialogue
When writing or telling a story you almost always have dialogue, it is unavoidable. A story without dialogue is like a chocolate cake without chocolate: just plain vanilla. You need to have the characters converse in your writing, even if you’re doing an essay, dialogue will help your teacher and/or reader make it through the entire work! Seriously, think about it for a second: who wants to sit and read a stack of essays that are all serious and straight to the point? No one! Occasionally, a funny essay can really be a breath of fresh air. But, you must do it right, otherwise it will look as if you just didn’t do your due diligence, and that is no bueno. But I digress. Dialogue enhances almost any piece of work.
So how does one go about writing good dialogue? Cliche is easy. Chunky is easy. Pristine is easy-ish. But how about natural dialogue? Don’t try so hard. Let your fingers fly. It’s really quite simple to write natural dialogue as long as you can overpower your brain’s urge to do it perfectly. Let me explain: when you’re talking you can’t go back and change what you said unless you consciously stop, say you’re going back and resay it. Which means that sometimes when you’re talking, it won’t be perfect and sometimes it’ll be downright silly! So when you’re writing dialogue, sometimes it shouldn’t make sense and sometimes it should be downright silly! The reader wants to read something that sounds natural. Which means it’s imperfect!
When writing your dialogue, the punctuation really, really needs to be imperfect. Dialogue is when you really need to ignore the rules and instead follow the unwritten rules. What I mean is you really need to use commas as pauses and periods as pace setters. More so than in narrative. It’s imperative that you abuse punctuation!
Quotes
One of the other uses a quotation mark has is to, get this, quote something. When writing you use it to indicate that these words were said by someone else, for example, if I were to quote my book, Earthlings, I would do so with quotation marks, for example: Tears can be used to show many emotions, like Seth says in his Sequel to Earthlings, “Tears started welling up inside her eyes. I hate him! She thought. Lord, She started praying as Ryder stood there, watching her, the tears in his eyes only magnified the hope he had, hope that she’d forgive him.” Do you see? I used the quotation marks to indicate that I had said something in a different piece of work, it didn’t indicate that a character was talking. However, when quoting something where a character talks, you would do so using single quotation marks (‘). Like this: it’s awkward if you go to ask someone a question and they know you’re going to ask it, in the sequel to Earthlings this very thing happens, “Elizabeth was shocked silent for a second, ‘dang, you’re quick,’ she was grinning. ‘What do you mean?’ his head was cocked.” The single quotation marks take the place of the normal quotation marks when someone is quoting something with dialogue.
Scare Quotes
The last thing you really use quotation marks on are scare quotes. A scare quote is used when you’re talking and you have to use a certain word because there isn’t a better one for it, for instance: I write my “scripts,” for the lack of a better term, like I’d write an itinerary. See? I use the words “scripts” but I then go on to say it’s not really a script, but I couldn’t find a better word. This one seems rather simple and we tend to use it when speaking in real life as well — if you don’t understand, look it up.
Conclusion
Quotation marks are a powerful mark, but they really shine in dialogue, if you know how to write dialogue well, you will be better than most writers. So learn to use dialogue and learn to use it naturally. It should be one of the easiest things to write.
On Your Own Questions:
6.1 What is dialogue great at doing?
6.2 Stories without dialogue are like chocolate cake without the—
6.3 Good dialogue should sound natural, how do you get natural dialogue?
6.4 Why should punctuation in dialogue be especially imperfect?
6.5 When are single quotation marks used?
6.6 When are scare quotes used?
Help get the word out! The more people know how to write, the more you get to read!
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