Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25037895-20140817052331

It's beyond important that a story has quotations with correct punctuation. Readers will quickly notice the punctuation errors around quotations. Some readers skim over the quotations in a story before reading the story, to determine whether the story has mistakes in grammar. This can prevent your story from even being read. So why would you not use the proper punctuation?

There only is a couple different ways to use quotations. For example, when a character speaks, this is called dialogue. The quotation marks must come before the first word and after the period, like this:


 * “It's really hard to think with all this commotion.”

There's two ways to approach quotations in the dialogue of your story. You could either identify the speaker, or not. Keep in mind that when you don't identify the speaker directly, then you must end the paragraph right on the spot. This keeps the reader from becoming confused, or simply getting lost. Example:


 * “I don't know if they're ever coming back.”


 * “Maybe that's a good thing,” said the salesman.

From here, you can continue the paragraph onward, or start a new paragraph. Quotation marks can be used to “split sentences.” There are three allowable styles to use quotation marks in the middle of a sentence. There may be more, I'm not sure. These are all relatively simple, so here is an example of each.


 * Quoting a term used by another during narrative:
 * The plan was to meet at “the subway station” shortly after midnight.


 * Quoting a term used by another during dialogue:
 * “Are you really qualified for the position, considering you only have 'four months experience' sir?”


 * Starting the dialogue in the middle of a sentence, using a comma. Capitalize the first word:
 * As the figure examined the premises the home-owner yelled, “I'm calling the cops.”

A quotation can always make its own sentence from start to finish. It doesn't need to be a “complete sentence” necessarily. There are two ways of doing this correctly.
 * Emphasizing a break in the quotation:
 * “Put your. Put your hands in the air, God dammit!”


 * Using a period to end a remark, and identifying the speaker in the following sentence:
 * “Yeah, right.” She said in an optimistic, shy tone. 