IVE BEEN WAITING ALL YEAR TO POST THIS YOU DONT EVEN KNOW

Writing Tips

Punctuating Dialogue

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➸ “This is a sentence.”

➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.

➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”

➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”

➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”

➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”

➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.

“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.

“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”

➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”

➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”

However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!

➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.

If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)

➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“

“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.

➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.

➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”

➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.

“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”

➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.

“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”

You're not immune to being the bully btw. You're not immune to being in the wrong

FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

Cat mute for euphonium.

Video/caption/photo by Kazuhiro Tsukimura

If you said yes to the first 3 please explain in the tags what animal it was and what was the damage

Please feel free to reblog for a wider audience.

for like a decade I kept getting the advice of "don't ruminate" but also "sit with your emotions" and I was like What The Fuck Does That Even Mean. until someone finally explained it in a way that makes sense:

so there's the emotional part of your brain ("I'm embarrased") and then there's the storytelling part ("all my friends hate me and I'm a piece of shit"). when people say "don't ruminate" what they mean is don't feed the storytelling part

you tend to the emotion ("I'm feeling x. why am I feeling that? how do I move forward given that information? what's something nice I can do for myself right now to cope with this?") but you treat the storytelling part like a little goblin that's trying to be as unhelpful to this whole process as possible. this doesn't shut the storytelling goblin up completely, but it keeps it from causing so much chaos and over time it stops talking so damn much

it's basically like if you were trying to comfort a friend. you'd validate their emotions, but you wouldn't sit there and let them call themself a piece of shit. do that for yourself

sharing this in case someone else is also like Why Didn't Someone Just Say That

good fucking lord we need to demystify minerals. crystals do not have healing or magical powers you guys are just getting scammed