The largest gap in knowledge I've seen on Wattpad is people's ability to handle dialogue. Dialogue is the words that are being said by your characters. You know, those things in quotation marks?

Alright, let's start with the basics. A simple piece of dialogue is enclosed by quotation marks.

If you're trying to denote something being said, this is enough. However, you don't really know who is saying it. To indicate who is talking, you'd add something called a dialogue tag. A dialogue tag is usually combined to your quoted text with a comma.

A dialogue tag has two objectives. First, it denotes who is talking. Second, it denotes HOW they are talking. Notice that 'she' is not capitalized. This is because the dialogue tag resides in the same sentence as the quotations. It modifies HOW YOU SAY IT. Every dialogue tag will modify how the person is saying something.

You get that instead of saying it in a normal voice, she is saying it in a lower voice. Now, if you want to denote what she is doing while she says it, that becomes a descriptive beat. A descriptive beat does not affect how she says it, but what she's doing while she says it.

Notice that 'she' is now capitalized, because it's the start of a new sentence. If it's a proper noun like someone's name, it would always be capitalized, but when using pronouns, it changes.

Now, you can also put the dialogue tags/descriptive beats (hereby referred to as a modifier) in between two pieces of dialogue. If you do, you should connect BOTH sides with a comma.

But ONLY if it's the extension of a single sentence. If there were no modifier it would read

Now if you had two separate sentences, you would use capitalizations and a period.

This "rule" can be broken if you're using the sentence in the same way you might use a semi-colon, making the dialogue comma seemingly optional and up to your choice.

In the example above, the dialogue is which is a semicolon'd (two independent sentences) cut with a dialogue tag.

Now, what a lot of people try to do is have two modifiers on a single piece of dialogue. YOU CANNOT DO THIS!

DO NOT:

INSTEAD DO THIS:

Alright, when you are done with the dialogue, you must start a new paragraph. This is the mortal sin a lot of people make.

This more descriptions. Once your dialogue is finished, you'll usually move to a new paragraph. When you start a dialogue, it should start with a new paragraph (modifier can come first).

DO NOT:

DO:

If you desperately want it all to be one paragraph, you need to conjugate the sentences together, often with commas or semicolons.

I should also probably add that this is a really badly designed sentence, and there are many better ways to form it and get the same thing across. For example:

And just to note, you can included a paragraph with multiple sentences (by all accounts, a paragraph with dialogue and a descriptive beat already is two sentences), but these sentences need to all be related to describing how words are being said and what is happening while the words are being said. It's rare that more than one or two things are happening during any given dialogue, so it's rare for a dialogue to be followed by more than one or two sentences.

This rule also DOES NOT include multiple sentences within your set quotation marks. Within the quotation marks, it goes by its own rules. So this is ok:

If you have someone saying A LOT, you can actually break the dialogue up into paragraphs. Each paragraph should start with a quotation mark. You can add modifiers to ensure the reader still knows who is talking, but it isn't necessary in every paragraph if it's apparent who is talking. In a set of dialogue paragraphs with no modifiers, beats, or tags, only the final paragraph ends with a quotation mark. All dialogue paragraphs will still start with one.

DO NOT:

ii. DO:

Once again, this is not to say that you cannot have a sentence after dialogue, but that sentence has to be related to the dialogue being spoken.

The last thing to add is when you have an exclamation or a question mark. Do you automatically capitalize the next word as a new sentence? As it turns out question and exclamation marks can be used as either a comma or a period. So, if you're writing a new sentence as the case of a descriptive beat, it's capitalized, but if you were part of the same sentence as a dialogue tag it would not.

Anyway, the main take away here is... don't do a wall-o-text of dialogue. Dialogue should be spaced out and easy to read. People should be able to understand who said what. I will leave you with a dialogue heavy reading example...

**********

Note: This is not perfect, but the main take away is the spacing. Dialogue should be spaced out with frequent paragraph breaks. It should be easy to figure out who said what, and once again, NO Wall-o-Texts.

"Wow, you look, different," he said before he could stop himself.

She glanced up at him before rolling her eyes.

"It's Saturday. My temp job ended Friday. I wouldn't even be here if Dr. Dhillon didn't beg to have me here one more day."

"Well, you look really beau... eehhh...um... good," Darian quickly said, trying to prevent a blush from appearing on his cheeks.

"Heh, my mom would disagree," she snorted, a small mischievous smile appearing on her face, "but thank you."

Darian nodded, another blush starting to come.

"So, where to?" He asked, trying to sound casual.

"Well, Dr. Dhillon is late, so I suppose we will just have to wait until he sees fit to show up," Pam shook her head in irritation.

"So have you been a temp long?" Darian inquired to fill the silence.

"Long enough... it would have been nice had someone told you that a college degree is useless without experience."

Darian let out a chuckle. "I know exactly what you mean. I suppose secretary temp is a smarter move than laboratory rat."

She joined him with a laugh. "Well in retrospect, I think you have me beat."

She had a very beautiful smile. Now that he saw her in a less formal environment, he wondered how she had ever grated on his nerves before.

"So, what are you doing in a week?"