Writing Dialogue
A technical primer denoting some rules and conventions.
For many of us, we internalise the rules of writing by reading — by sheer osmosis, we take them in, and we replicate them in our own work, often without even realising. When it comes to technical rules, though, it can be difficult to grasp them intuitively because they’re tethered to other rules of grammar we might not entirely understand, and dialogue is one of those difficult things to get.
For years, I struggled to understand a lot of dialogue rules, and subsequently stuff I’ve written as recently as two or three years ago is incredibly difficult to read because the dialogue is good, but the way it’s presented makes it confusing and hard to follow, because it doesn’t follow some basic conventions. For that reason, as I go through the rules here, I’m going to try to explain, without getting too bogged down in technical language, why the rules exist and are followed the way we follow them, because for me, part of the reason I was defensive about learning some dialogue rules, and resistant to changing how I wrote dialogue, was because I didn’t understand why certain rules existed.
Just a note before I get going — I’m Welsh and typically use double quotation marks / speech marks (“.”), but a lot of Brits will use single quotation marks (‘.’), and using one or the other is…
