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Description:
Today's lesson is about using proper punctuation for your writing. It's important to make sure that your words and phrases are marked correctly. Imagine having a character scream "Fire, fire, help." Yeah, that doesn't sound too urgent, does it?
Transcript
- 00:04
[Coop and Dino singing]
- 00:13
Writing realistic dialogue can be tough after all you can't have
- 00:17
characters grunting at each other for an entire book [A couple grunting while eating a meal]
- 00:19
well maybe you could but it'd be pretty weird book and there's a whole lot of
- 00:23
rules we have to follow to make sure our dialogue is clear to the reader but [Man nailing rules to a wall]
Full Transcript
- 00:26
never fear we've got some handy dandy tools in our dialogue tool belt and it's
- 00:31
fashionable to so one important tool at our disposal our dialogue tags [Coop discussing dialogue tags]
- 00:35
those are simply phrases that identify who said what and we guarantee you've
- 00:39
seen these before stuff like he said or she said...those are dialogue tags [Examples of dialogue tags]
- 00:43
they come in handy because the more people are speaking the more important
- 00:47
it is for the reader to know who's saying what it can be hard enough
- 00:50
keeping track of a multi-person conversation in person [Lots of people having separate conversations]
- 00:53
just imagine what it's like when those people don't even have distinct faces
- 00:56
actually don't imagine that kind of freaky anyway these guys can be as [Boy runs away from faceless people at a dinner table]
- 01:00
descriptive as you want for example if a woman whispers
- 01:03
something you can use the tag she whispered or if a man screams something [Man wearing black sunglasses walks into library]
- 01:07
you can use the tag he screamed we just hope he was polite enough not to scream
- 01:10
in anyone's ear... There are also a lot of rules that cover the punctuation of
- 01:14
dialogue one major one is that we use a comma to separate the dialogue tag from [Dino teaching the punctuation of dialogue]
- 01:19
the actual dialogue so if some guy who works at a pet store picks up a dog and
- 01:23
says this is a terrier we'd write that as he said comma this is a terrier with [Man holding a terrier dog]
- 01:28
a comma-separating the dialogue tag from the actual dialogue we could also flip
- 01:31
the dialogue tag in the dialogue making sure that we continue to separate them
- 01:35
with a comma we could even add some more text to either side of the dialogue and
- 01:39
all we need is comma's on either side of the quote to keep it separated turns out
- 01:43
it's much easier to separate texts for dialogue that it is to separate terrier [Terrier chewing on man's tie]
- 01:47
from your favorite tie.. The only time this comment separation thing doesn't work is
- 01:51
if we're dealing with questions or exclamations say the guy now asks the
- 01:55
terrier are you eating my tie? If any texts came before the dialogue we'd [Man asks terrier if it is eating his tie]
- 02:00
still separate the two with a comma but if any text comes after the question mark remains in
- 02:05
place and does the separating same thing happens if it's an explanation like
- 02:09
you're eating my tie! and yeah he totally is oh and one last
- 02:13
thing the punctuation that ends dialogue always stays inside the quotation marks
- 02:17
no matter where the surrounding text happens to be unlike a hungry terrier
- 02:21
punctuation never manages to escape [Terrier runs away from man holding ties]
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