Why Do So Many Amateur Writers Punctuate Quotes All Wrong?
Sorry, but readers won’t forgive your dialogue mistakes.
I am one of many judges for the first round of a short story contest, so I read lots of amateur writers’ work, and I see lots of them making the same mistakes.
Lots of common mistakes, I completely understand making. Who among us hasn’t used a flimsy adjective or adverb in an attempt to provide specificity, before figuring out that it usually does the opposite? Who hasn’t picked a fancy word for the sake of variety that ends up bothering readers like a baseball under the mattress? Who hasn’t weakened their work with a cliché or plot inconsistency every now and then?
I certainly have. I’ve been guilty of all these writerly transgressions and more. These are issues you can’t fix by searching the internet for what is “correct.” There is no one “correct” solution.
But an error I find all too often that does have a correct solution is not punctuating dialogue correctly. And that, there’s no excuse for.
A Quick Rundown on How to Punctuate Dialogue Correctly
I’m not going to tell you how to correctly punctuate every dialogue eccentricity, but I will tell you what you need to know to get it right…
