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The Biggest Grammatical Error I’ve Made Is A Truly Stupid One
Fixing 4 novels after the fact is a pain in the ass
Pop quiz! Which of the following is the correct way to write dialogue?
“I don’t know,” She said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t know.” She said.
If you said 2, then well done! If you said 1 or 3 or quoted the line itself by not knowing, I feel your pain.
In spite of English being my best subject from an early age, and having an intuitive understanding of grammar growing up, I only learned a couple of years ago that I had been messing up on a regular basis. That’s right, until just a few years ago, I believed that number 3 on that list of examples was the correct way to write dialogue.
I have an early memory from around the age of 6/7 of asking my mum, who of course was the fountain of all wisdom when I was that age, the correct way to write it. I’d nailed the differences between there/their/they’re and alike but I just couldn’t figure it out. As I was already writing short stories at that point, it was something I needed to know. She told me that the dialogue itself is a full sentence, so it ends in a full stop (or question mark, etc) with a capital letter coming next. That worked for me, so I ran with it.
