Just realized I was using dialogue tags completely backward for like 5 years

I always thought you had to write 'he said' or 'she whispered' BEFORE the quote every single time. Like 'He said, "I'm going to the store."' That's how I wrote my whole first novel draft (all 80k words of it). Then my writing group buddy read my first chapter and asked why I never put tags after or in the middle of dialogue. I felt so dumb. Now I'm going back and rewriting like half my scenes. Has anyone else had a basic writing rule click way later than it should have?

3 comments

3 Comments

piper_reed16d ago

Took me 4 years to figure out commas go inside quotation marks.

hugo82515d ago

Oh buddy, I hate to be that person, but you might actually have learned the wrong rule. In American English, yeah, commas and periods go inside the quotes. But if you're writing for a UK audience or using British English, they actually put them outside unless the comma is part of the quoted material itself. So it really depends on which style guide you're following.

elizabethtaylor15d ago

Add to that the chaos of learning that question marks and exclamation points follow their own weird rules depending on the context! It's a grammar minefield for sure.