Dialogue Dilemmas and Punctuation Perils

During a writers' retreat in October, I attended a workshop where the guest speaker talked about manuscript submission. She stressed the importance of proper formatting and having a firm grasp on English composition rules when submitting to publishers.

The topic of dialogue tags brought a lot of questions about styles, creative tags, and punctuation. Many authors struggle with the difference between the British method of punctuating dialogue as opposed to the American English format. (I'll address those differences in a later post.)

During the session, a writer next to me was having a particularly difficult time grasping how he would punctuate a sentence. His quotation contained an end mark, an exclamation mark, and he had a dialogue tag following the quotation. He was showing me some examples and asked for my grammatical critique, since he had learned I am a freelance editor.

When I read his dialogue example, I realized the problem was not a punctuation issue at all. The writing was missing another essential element that not only can solve a writer's confusion with punctuation, but add life to a dialogue that holds a reader's attention.


The reader doesn't need the traditional "he said" at the end of a dialogue. The quotation marks tell the reader that the character said something. If your scene has been established, the reader probably already knows who is talking. The reader needs a picture.

The concept is simple: Show, don't tell. 

Any writer who has taken a creative writing course or read a book on creative writing is familiar with it. Yet, when we struggle as writers (myself included), we tend to forget that simple idea. We lose ourselves in the forest of dialogue tags and flat writing. Maybe it's because we are not thinking outside the box. Maybe we get lazy (I'm speaking to myself here also).

I took the writer's example and gave it a twist with the "Show, don't tell" strategy. His eyes lit as though I'd revealed some hidden gem. Here's a close representation of his example and how I added the strategy.

His sentence:
"You said you'd guard the stone with your life!" she yelled angrily.

My twist:
"You said you'd guard the stone with your life!" Angela spun round on her heels and stomped toward the door. 

See how I added that extra visual imagery? It gives the reader a picture. You can add "he said" and "she said" all day long, and even change your "said" to "yelled" or some equivalent, but your writing won't have the extra dimension that the "Show, don't tell" strategy can give it.

"Show, don't tell" also helps rid the need for adverbs in your dialogue.

In his book On Writing Stephen King argues, "Spend adverbs sparingly, like they were $100 bills."

In my example, you know with the sentence I added that Angela is angry. You see it with her action. The exclamation point at the end of the quotation already tells the reader she is angry. The word "angrily" from the writer's example is redundant and unnecessary once you add the action in the next sentence.

If your dialogues seem dull, go back and work in the "Show, don't tell" strategy. Chances are, the actions are already worked into your scene outside of the dialogue. Not only will your writing improve, but you won't have to look at a replacement list for that pesky word "said" as often.


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