Dialect

When I first started writing, I didn’t pay too much attention to the way people spoke. I figured I was lucky to get my characters to sound as if they were holding a real conversation, rather than reading alternate paragraphs from an 18th century tome on rhetorical

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Dialog

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is

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He said, she said

A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it. “Run!” Jeff cried. (“Jeff cried” is the speech tag.)

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