Tuesday, September 17, 2024

More conversational writing

As an English teacher, I try to encourage students to engage in as much dialogue as possible in their writing. Pick up any good book and just scan through the pages to find out the percentage of content that is actually pure conversation and thinking to oneself; and you'll realize that more than half to 80% of story content is indeed made up of dialogues. 


She just needs a few pointers:

1. Punctuation -- I can't emphasize this enough -- open with open inverted commas, and end with a comma or full stop (she needs to be able to tell which), before her closing inverted commas.

2. Each conversation and reply is a paragraph by itself -- each person in a dialogue will open a new paragraph unless it's the same person continuing a sentence after an action, i.e. "Hello," he said while looking at her, "How are you?"

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