The Editor Pontificates: He Said, She Said

Punctuating dialogue seems to be a bête noire for a lot of fiction writers. Never mind what word you should use for describing your character’s utterance – he said, she yelled, it whispered, I answered – the real question seems to be, do you capitalise it or not? Which punctuation mark goes on the end of the sentence, inside the quotation marks, and what goes outside?

It’s not really that hard. Dialogue in fiction, I told the Offspring when we were homeschooling, is like speech bubbles in com...