Great Dialogue
Under the new Common Core Standards 3rd grade and up are writing narratives, including the use of dialogue. Dialogue is what is actually said by a person or character and is important to include in both fictional and nonfiction narratives.
Requiring proficiency in dialogue this early is new: for example, the old Arkansas Language Arts Curriculum standards introduced dialogue in 4th grade and concentrated on it in 7th and 8th, the only grades to specifically mention it. Now, it is required from 3rd grade on.
Common Core Writing Standards, grade 3, Text Types and Purposes, 3b.
“Use dialogue and descriptions of actions, thoughts, and feelings to develop experiences and events or show the response of characters to situations.”
Technical Stuff on Dialogue: Punctuation and More
- Quotes: Use double quotation marks around the words a person actually says.
- Always goes inside the quote marks.
- No speech tag afterward. Use the same punctuation you always would.
- Dialogue is followed by a tag such as “he said.” In this case, periods are changed to a comma, but exclamation points and question marks stay the same.
- Dialogue Tags: Most of the time, simplicity is best, just use “he said” or “she said.” Professional writers seldom vary from this and when they do, it’s for emphasis. It’s popular to teach students to use a variety of forms, such as these: he exclaimed, he shouted, he whispered. If you are doing this as an exercise in using a thesaurus, fine. Otherwise, don’t do it.
- No Added Modifiers
No adverbs. Also, keep the dialogue tags clean by not adding unnecessary modifiers. Adverbs and participles should be used sparingly, if at all. They must add new information or nuances that could not be added in other ways.NOT: “I’m cold,” she said (simply, boldly, honestly, quickly, etc.)
No -ing phrases. The other construction that shows up is adding a verb-ing form (a participle).
NOT: “I’m cold,” he said, (pulling on a glove, shoving a hat on his head, closing the window, etc.)
Punctuation at the end of a sentence in dialogue:
Tips for Teaching Dialogue
- Start with Graphic Novels or Comics.
One idea for teaching dialogue is to use graphic novels. The dialogue, what a character says, is within the speech bubble. Use one panel from the comic and ask students to change it into a correctly punctuated sentence. For example, maybe a speech bubble has Superman saying, “They don’t have a chance!” Written as a sentence, it would look like one of these:Superman said, “They don’t have a chance!”
“They don’t have a chance!” Superman said. -
Highlight the dialogue words. use highlighters to mark the words the character/person actually says. Then work to punctuate those words.