Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Story

Quotations

Hello there to all of those of you who clicked on this hoping to grasp at some valuable advice regarding "quotations". I'll try to help you as much as I can. I'll go through all the cases that you would use quotations in a list type form. 

Part One: Quotations

1. Titles

Often, titles have quotations around them. It's just how it is. By titles, I mean titles of books, movies, games, etc. 

Example: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" by J.K. Rowling

        Likewise, if you are writing a school report or essay, it is very possible that your teacher might ask you to put quotations around the title. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes they may ask for you to underline it or put it in italics.

2. Quoting Someone

If you are quoting the exact words that someone said, it requires quotations around it. If you aren't saying exactly what they said, it does not.

Example of quotations: I can't believe Sandy said "ice cream is gross".

Example of no quotations: I can't believe that Sandy doesn't like ice cream.

        Notice the difference? I hope so. You may have already been thinking about dialogue. What if you are quoting someone through dialogue? You wouldn't put quotations around it, but apostrophes instead so you can differentiate from the two.

Example: "Sandy said 'ice cream is gross'," I exclaimed. "Can you believe that?'"

Part Two: Dialogue 

There are many different parts to dialogue and I'll work my way through each of them one by one.

Step 1: Add the Quotations 

This part I'm hoping that you got already. Let's say that our sentence we are saying is: "Let's go outside and play." We have our quotations so let's move on to step two.

Step 2: Dialogue Tags

A dialogue tag, to answer your next question, is when you say "he said" or "she exclaimed" etc. In order to add one, if you want to (it's isn't required), you have to do something first. You always have to add a comma first.

Example: "Let's go outside and play," he exclaimed.

        You might have also noticed that "he" is not capitalized. Don't capitalize if it is a dialogue tag. If it is directly related to the quote than don't, but if it isn't, capitalize it.

Example of non-related tag: "Let's go outside and play." He picked up his toy shovel and ran outside.

        In this case of the non-related tag, you put a period on the end and capitalize the next sentence. Also note that if you are using a question mark or exclamation point you would follow the same rules with not capitalizing the dialogue tag, but there would be no comma. Commas would only be used in place of a period.

Step 3: Adding More

By "adding more" I mean adding more dialogue after the tag. It's very simple. You would keep the period at the end of the tag and simply add more quotations.

Example: "Let's go outside and play," he exclaimed. "My mom bought me a new toy shovel."

        If it happens that you are continuing a sentence and your dialogue tag cut through it, the second half of the sentence would require a comma in front of it instead of a period and would start with a lowercase letter.

Example: "Let's go outside," he exclaimed, "and play with my new toy shovel!"

That's it for quotations. I hope that this is everlasting information that will aid you in your dialogue traumas. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask and I promise to help you out to the best of my abilities. Thanks so much for reading!