How do you punctuate dialogue with a speech tag?

The speech ends with a comma rather than a full stop, inside the closing quotation mark, and the tag that follows starts lower case. "I know," she said. If the speech ends in a question mark or an exclamation mark, that mark replaces the comma and the tag still starts lower case: "Do you?" she said. The tag is part of the same sentence as the speech, which is why it is never capitalised.

Does a new speaker always get a new paragraph?

Yes, and this is the one rule of dialogue that is genuinely not optional. A paragraph break is how the reader knows the speaker changed, because nothing else on the page tells them. Two speakers in one paragraph forces the reader to work out who said what, and they will get it wrong.

Do periods and commas go inside or outside the quotation marks?

In US style, always inside, regardless of logic. In UK style, inside only when the punctuation belongs to the speech itself and outside when it belongs to the surrounding sentence. For dialogue in fiction the two systems mostly agree, because the comma or full stop genuinely does belong to the spoken line. The divergence shows up around quoted fragments rather than around speech.

Should I use single or double quotation marks?

Double is standard in the US, single is standard in the UK and much of the Commonwealth, and either is correct as long as the book is consistent. The nested case reverses: US puts a quote inside a quote in single marks, UK uses double. Pick by where your readers are, then never mix.

What happens when one character speaks for several paragraphs?

Open every paragraph with a quotation mark and close only the last one. The missing closing mark at the end of each intermediate paragraph is the signal that the same person is still talking. It looks like an error and it is not; it is the convention Chicago describes for continuing quotations and dialogue.

When do I use a dash and when an ellipsis in dialogue?

A dash cuts a line off; an ellipsis lets it fade. Use an em dash when a speaker is interrupted or interrupts themselves, and an ellipsis when they trail off, hesitate, or run out of things to say. They are not interchangeable: one is a collision, the other is a decay.

How do I format an action beat instead of a speech tag?

An action beat is a separate sentence, so the speech ends with a full stop rather than a comma and the beat is capitalised. "I know." She put the cup down. Using a comma there is the most common dialogue punctuation error, because a beat describes an action rather than the act of speaking, and you cannot smile or shrug a sentence.

How to format dialogue in a book

Dialogue is the part of a manuscript where punctuation errors are most visible and least forgiven, because it is the part readers move through fastest. A misplaced comma in narration slows somebody down for an instant. A misplaced comma in dialogue makes them lose track of who is speaking.

The conventions are small in number. Most of them exist to answer one question the reader is asking continuously and never consciously: who is talking now?

The comma that replaces the full stop

A line of speech followed by a tag ends with a comma, not a full stop, and the tag stays lower case.

“I know,” she said.

The reason is grammatical rather than decorative. She said is not a new sentence. The speech is its object, so the whole thing is one sentence and the comma is doing what a comma does. Capitalising She would announce a sentence that has not started.

Question marks and exclamation marks are the exception, because they cannot be replaced by a comma without losing what they say. The tag still stays lower case.

“Do you?” she said.

“Get out!” he said.

That lower-case she after a question mark looks wrong to almost everyone the first time. It is correct, and it is one of the fastest ways to tell a copy-edited manuscript from an uncopy-edited one.

The error nearly every manuscript makes

Speech tags and action beats are different things and take different punctuation.

A tag describes the act of speaking: said, asked, whispered, shouted. It attaches to the speech with a comma.

A beat describes something else the character does. It is its own sentence, so the speech ends with a full stop and the beat is capitalised.

“I know.” She put the cup down.

The mistake is writing the beat as though it were a tag:

“I know,” she smiled.

You cannot smile a sentence. Nor shrug, laugh, nod, grin or frown one. Those are things a body does, not ways of producing speech, so they cannot take the speech as their object. The fix is a full stop and a capital, which is also the better sentence, because it separates the line from the gesture and lets each one land.

Laughed is the one that starts arguments. Some editors accept “I know,” she laughed on the grounds that you can laugh words out. Most do not. If you want the laugh and the line together, the beat version costs nothing.

A new speaker gets a new paragraph

This is the rule with no exceptions and no stylistic variants, and it is doing more work than it looks like.

Prose has no other way of marking a change of speaker. There is no name in front of the line as there would be in a script. The paragraph break is the attribution, which is why a stretch of dialogue can run for a page with no he said anywhere and stay perfectly clear: the reader is counting alternations.

“You’re late.”

“The train.”

“It’s always the train.”

Nobody is named and nobody needs to be. Break that pattern by putting two speakers in one paragraph and the count fails, silently, and every line after it is attached to the wrong mouth until the reader stops and reconstructs it.

A character’s own action goes in their paragraph, with their speech. That is what tells the reader the gesture belongs to the person talking rather than to the person listening.

One person talking for a long time

When a single speaker runs to more than one paragraph, open each paragraph with a quotation mark and close only the final one.

“We got there at six. The house was dark, which I did not think about at the time, because the lights were on a timer and the timer had been wrong all week.

“It was not the timer.”

The intermediate paragraph deliberately has no closing mark. That absence is the signal: nothing has closed, so the same person is still speaking. Chicago describes this for continuing quotations, and dialogue follows it.

It looks like a typo, and proofreaders who have not met it will try to fix it. It is worth knowing that it is intentional, because the alternative — closing every paragraph — tells the reader the speech ended and a new one began, which is exactly what did not happen.

Interruption and trailing off

Two different events, two different marks, and they are not interchangeable.

An em dash cuts the line off. Something arrived and stopped it: another speaker, an action, or the speaker’s own change of mind.

“I thought you were going to—”

“I did.”

An ellipsis lets the line decay. Nothing stopped it; it ran out.

“I suppose it might have been…”

Chicago’s example for self-interruption is a speaker who breaks off their own sentence and restarts: “I thought I might— Oh, it’s no use.” The dash marks the collision between the abandoned clause and the new one.

The choice is a characterisation decision more than a punctuation one. A character who gets cut off mid-word is in a different scene from a character whose sentences dissolve.

The writers who refuse the marks entirely

A steady minority of novelists set dialogue with no quotation marks at all, and it is worth understanding what they are doing before deciding you want it.

James Joyce called inverted commas perverted commas and used a dash at the head of the line instead, which is the convention Ulysses runs on and which he may have picked up from French practice. Cormac McCarthy took the same position more bluntly, telling Oprah Winfrey that there is no reason to “blot the page up with weird little marks”, and naming Joyce as the model: keep the punctuation to an absolute minimum. The habit did not die with either of them. Sally Rooney, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma and Miranda July all publish dialogue unmarked.

What the removal buys is a page where speech and narration have the same texture, so a line of dialogue arrives without being announced as one. In McCarthy that produces the flatness people describe as biblical. In Rooney it makes the speech feel continuous with the thought around it.

The cost is that you have given up the reader’s main attribution signal, and McCarthy is explicit about what that requires. Writers who imitate him, he said, need to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and to write in such a way as to guide people as to who is speaking.

That is the whole test. Unmarked dialogue does not remove work; it moves the work into the prose, which now has to carry the attribution through rhythm, vocabulary and the paragraph breaks alone. If your reader has to reread a page of exchange to sort out who said what, the technique has failed and the marks were doing something after all.

One practical note if you go this way: be consistent about it. A book that drops quotation marks but keeps them for a letter, a sign or a remembered line is fine, and a book that drops them irregularly reads as an error.

Single or double quotation marks

Double marks are standard in the United States; single marks are standard in the United Kingdom and much of the Commonwealth. Either is correct. Consistency is not optional.

The nesting reverses between the two systems:

	Outer speech	Quote inside the speech
US	“double”	‘single’
UK	‘single’	“double”

The punctuation rules differ too, and this is where the systems genuinely diverge rather than merely looking different. US style puts commas and full stops inside the closing mark, always, whether or not they belong to the quoted words. UK style puts them inside only if they belong to the speech, and outside if they belong to the sentence around it.

For dialogue in a novel the two mostly agree, because the comma at the end of a spoken line really is part of the line. The divergence shows up when you quote a fragment inside narration, which is a non-fiction problem more than a fiction one.

The quotation marks themselves

Whichever system you choose, the marks have to be the typographic ones — the curled characters, opening and closing distinct — rather than the straight vertical marks a keyboard produces by default. Straight quotes in a printed book read as unfinished work, and they are a giveaway that a file went to press without being typeset.

The apostrophe has a specific failure worth checking before you export. Word processors decide which direction to curl a mark by looking at what precedes it, so an apostrophe at the start of a word gets curled as an opening quote:

ʼtis, ʼem, ʼ90s

Each of those is wrong. An apostrophe is always a closing mark, regardless of where in the word it falls, because it stands for the letters that are missing. Chicago’s own recommendation is human intervention: find them and replace them, since no automatic rule gets this right.

Contraction-heavy dialogue is where this bites. A character who says ʼcause and ʼem throughout a novel can carry a hundred backwards apostrophes into print.

What this looks like in Nueel

Nueel applies the typographic marks as you write, following the language and the quotation style set in Details, and the apostrophe case is handled as a closing mark rather than by position, so ’tis and ’em curl the right way without your having to catch them.

Dialogue paragraphs take the book’s first-line indent like any other paragraph, and the widow and orphan rules apply to them, which matters more in dialogue than in narration: a single line of speech stranded at the top of a page loses the alternation the reader has been counting.

Most dialogue punctuation is one decision applied consistently. The one worth internalising is the difference between a tag and a beat, because it is the error an editor will mark on every page and the one that most reliably says the manuscript has not been through one.

Sources

The Chicago Manual of Style, Q&A on quotations — em dashes for interrupted and self-interrupted speech; and CMOS 6.117 on the apostrophe as a right single quotation mark, discussed in CMOS Shop Talk
MLA Style Center, Speech continuing across paragraphs — opening mark on each paragraph, closing mark only at the end
Matthew Butterick, Straight and curly quotes in Practical Typography
The Punctuation Guide — British versus American placement of commas and full stops, and single versus double marks
Open Culture, The three punctuation rules of Cormac McCarthy, and how they all go back to James Joyce — the Oprah interview, and Joyce’s “perverted commas”

Common questions

How do you punctuate dialogue with a speech tag?: The speech ends with a comma rather than a full stop, inside the closing quotation mark, and the tag that follows starts lower case. "I know," she said. If the speech ends in a question mark or an exclamation mark, that mark replaces the comma and the tag still starts lower case: "Do you?" she said. The tag is part of the same sentence as the speech, which is why it is never capitalised.
Does a new speaker always get a new paragraph?: Yes, and this is the one rule of dialogue that is genuinely not optional. A paragraph break is how the reader knows the speaker changed, because nothing else on the page tells them. Two speakers in one paragraph forces the reader to work out who said what, and they will get it wrong.
Do periods and commas go inside or outside the quotation marks?: In US style, always inside, regardless of logic. In UK style, inside only when the punctuation belongs to the speech itself and outside when it belongs to the surrounding sentence. For dialogue in fiction the two systems mostly agree, because the comma or full stop genuinely does belong to the spoken line. The divergence shows up around quoted fragments rather than around speech.
Should I use single or double quotation marks?: Double is standard in the US, single is standard in the UK and much of the Commonwealth, and either is correct as long as the book is consistent. The nested case reverses: US puts a quote inside a quote in single marks, UK uses double. Pick by where your readers are, then never mix.
What happens when one character speaks for several paragraphs?: Open every paragraph with a quotation mark and close only the last one. The missing closing mark at the end of each intermediate paragraph is the signal that the same person is still talking. It looks like an error and it is not; it is the convention Chicago describes for continuing quotations and dialogue.
When do I use a dash and when an ellipsis in dialogue?: A dash cuts a line off; an ellipsis lets it fade. Use an em dash when a speaker is interrupted or interrupts themselves, and an ellipsis when they trail off, hesitate, or run out of things to say. They are not interchangeable: one is a collision, the other is a decay.
How do I format an action beat instead of a speech tag?: An action beat is a separate sentence, so the speech ends with a full stop rather than a comma and the beat is capitalised. "I know." She put the cup down. Using a comma there is the most common dialogue punctuation error, because a beat describes an action rather than the act of speaking, and you cannot smile or shrug a sentence.