Dialogue No-No? · 5:22am Jun 3rd, 2012
Alright, hey everypony. So I've been typing up a new chapter and I noticed that I may have been doing something wrong...throughout my whole story. So whenever a character talks quotations are put around the piece of dialogue, right? It would go something like this: "Now, I want you to help me," Speederclaw said. "Please?" Instead of doing "," I've been doing "." So it would be: "Now, I want you to help me." Speederclaw said. "blahblahbsdnklgjlsd." Now I'm not 100% sure if it can go either way...but now that I look at it, it looks awkward. So I pretty much have to fix the entire story so far -_-. If someone could verify this for me, it'd be one less problem for me to worry about. Thanks in advance and expect a new chapter soon (even though I said that already :P)
If I had any grammatical abilities at all, I would help you, but I can offer some advice.
To fix this problem(if necessary) you simply need to open a chapter, click edit, press Ctrl+F, then type in | ." |
It will highlight all of the mistakes, and you can correct them with ease. Or if you have Microsoft word, you can just Ctrl+C Ctrl+V the entire story and use the "Replace" tool to fix it like that. But I'm guessing it isn't a problem and I just wasted 5 minutes of my life.
Fluttershy511's right; it's an easy fix, but it does need to be fixed. I'm quoting an editor of mine here: Whenever a speaker's lines would end in a period, but there is a speaker tag or more of the sentence afterwords, it has to end in a comma, not a period.
150624
151519
Thanks both of you so very much for clearing it up for me. Now I can rest easy knowing that i will be able to correctly portray dialogue (after school's over of course).
160222
It's no trouble, Friend. I'm always glad to help a fellow writer with such things.
160222
No problem my friend!