virtuous-thing:

kat-snow2613:

jawnwats:

prismatic-bell:

cj-amused:

tenoko1:

evildorito:

onewordtest:

trikruwriter:

“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement. 

“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”

“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”

Things I didn’t know

“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.

Reblog to save a life

I love how easy it can be to learn stuff like this through tumblr and not through school.

Actually… in the one about dashes, neither of them should have been inside the quotation marks; the only punctuation marks that go inside quotation marks even if they’re not part of the quotation itself are periods and commas. Instead, it should have been:

“And”

–

she waved a pen as though to underline her statement – “if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

I have also added spaces around the en-dash; if you don’t want spaces, use an em-dash (which is longer). In Word, if you type two hyphens in between two other words without spaces on either side of the hyphens, it will automatically turn it into an em-dash. On Tumblr, you need three hyphens to make an em-dash, so:

“And”—she waved a pen as though to underline her statement—“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action,” etc.