Dialogue

The rules of using dialogue Correctly 

Rule One: Each person "lives" in their own paragraph.

• Each time a new character is speaking you should start a new indented paragraph.

Example:

     "It looks like summer will be here before you know it," Sarah said excitedly as she was counting down the days of school in her calendar.

      "I know!" Exclaimed Zoey, "Do you have any exciting plans?"

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Rule Two: Always surround whatever words are coming from the character's mouth with quotations.

     "It looks like summer will be here before you know it," Sarah said excitedly as she was counting down the days of school in her calendar.

      "I know!" Exclaimed Zoey, "Do you have any exciting plans?"

     "I think we are planning on going to San Diego," responded Sarah. 

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Rule Three: Keep all punctuation inside the quotation marks. 

Rule Four: If the speaker's words are divided by a speaker tag, both parts of the speaker's words are surrounded by quotes.

Example:

"A baby is born with around 300 bones," explained Ethan, "but an adult human only has 206 bones in their body."

Rule Five: If you use a ? or ! leave out the comma. 

Rule 6: The first word of a quote is capitalized.

Mrs. Gonzalez reminded us, "Your two-voice poems are due tomorrow." 

When to use dialogue.

• Moving the story forward.  The dialogue's main role in a personal narrative is to help the story move forward by re-creating people’s conversations and thoughts.
• Revealing the characters. Dialogue also helps the writer reveal character traits.  The dialogue helps reveal each person's real personality and voice to give the story realism.  The dialogue also conveys the characters' emotions and shows how people interact with one another.
• Showing not telling. Dialogue may be used to give the personal narrative authenticity and to make the story realistic by showing what is happening rather than just telling the reader about it.
•  For example, the following is a sentence that tells: John was angry after Mike betrayed him. If the author chose dialogue instead, he or she could write, John stomped around the room. Or "Ah! How dare he? How could he betray me?'" 
• The latter shows anger through the dialogue without using the word "angry."