Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25037895-20140817052331/@comment-10950063-20140817112314

You don't have to identify speakers. I'm not sure where you got that from what I said, but sorry for that. Not identifying a speaker is completely fine and can make dialogue flow better. In general, though, I think it's best to keep this just about punctuation and formatting.

My points were the you need to delve into how standard dialogue is formatted right at the top. That is quotation marks, comma inside the quotes, first letter of the first word after the quotes is uncapitalized unless it's a proper name. You kind of do this, but it should be much more explicit.

The thing about question marks and exclamation points is to highlight that even when ending dialogue in a sentence without a comma you still don't capitalize the first letter of what comes next unless it's a whole new sentence.

I think the last part should be removed. The new example is less jarring than the original, but I don't think it's necessary. It's a style thing, not necessarily correct grammar. If I saw someone doing it, I probably wouldn't change it, but I don't want people thinking it's the correct way to do things.

Throw in a few examples of how not to punctuate dialogue. LIke:

"I'm writing correctly," I said.

NOT

"I'm writing correctly." I said

OR

"I'm writing correctly,". I said

OR

"I'm writing correctly",  I said.

I've seen people do a ton of weird things punctuating dialogue, so it's impossible to get them all, but I think showing people how not to do things helps sometimes.

"There are four allowable styles to use quotation marks in the middle of a sentence. There may be more, I'm not sure." This needs removed. If you don't know, there's no reason to put a number on it. Also, two of the examples aren't about using quotes in the middle of sentences.

I think those are the big things.