Dialogue Helper

Start with quotation marks, like this (double, not single, in American English):

            “Ouch! My toe hurts.”

Punctuation in dialogue, including exclamation points, question marks, periods, commas, belongs inside the quotation marks, like this:

            “Ouch! My toe hurts.”

It’s called a speech tag when a speaker is mentioned by name or by pronoun, like this:

            “Ouch! My toe hurts,” Fred said.

            “Ouch! My toe hurts,” he said.

Notice that the peri...