Tip from Editors: Learn to puncutate dialog

[Bill Snodgrass]

I (an editor of one magazine) was just chatting with an editor from another magazine. This editor was complaining that the author did not know the BASICS of dialog puncutation. I laughed, having just srubbed a manuscript to fix the same kinds of errors.

"You'd think," my editor friend said, "that anyone holding themselves up as an author, and thinking their work good enough to get paid would know how to do the basics with dialog!"

We went on to share examples.

"Well," she said, "I just started reading a submission that was so bad, I stopped on page two. I just couldn't stand it any more."

I just thought this was worth sharing for aspiring writers.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Definitely is - but it is also frightening to see the number of errors from someone calling themselves an editor!!

 

[Bill Snodgrass]

So true! Touché!

Yet there is a difference between a manuscript submitted for consideration and a post on a web site!

 

[Brian G Turner]

Indeed - I typo all the time online.

We could do with a spell checker here...

 

[fungi from Yuggoth]

What specific errors were most common Bill?

 

[Bill Snodgrass]

The biggest problem I had to deal with was the punctuation around the speech tags (attributions). The correct form is easy to example:

"Oh, that was really boring," she said.

What the author wrote was this:

"Oh, that was really boring." She said.

This happened several times. The other author reported essentially the same thing.

 

[Treikayan]

"Then, there is this one".

"The quotation marks enclose the dialog and the punctuation," I stated.

Ooo, how many times I see that and it annoys me.

 

[aurelio]

I take it you don't like the newest literary trends, Bill? The ones that don't include quotation marks at all, or give any dialog attributions? I've seen this in some "literary" mags. The idea is that if you are paying attention you'll know who is speaking and what is spoken dialog rather than description. Personally, I think this whole conceit is absurd, and it makes these writers' work difficult to read if not impossible.

I'm all for exploring language and style, but this goofiness is a bit like removing all the streetlights because you feel people should simply intuit when to stop. Yeah, right.

 

[Bill Snodgrass]

Aurelio,

When dialog tags are not needed, I have no problem with them being omitted. But punctuation omitted? !!!!!!

I agree with your last statement!