“Format the dialogue correctly, or you’ll lose points off your grade,” the professor warned.
“But I don’t know how to do that!” I despaired and went online for help.
Isn’t that a story of your life? Don’t worry; we’ve all been there, and we’re happy to help you out! We’ll explain how to write a conversation in an essay and how to format it according to MLA or APA guidelines. With our tips, you will get extra points for clever use of dialogue for sure.
How to Put Dialogue in a Paper in Three Ways
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you imagine a dialogue? It can be a YouTube video, a podcast, or a new episode of your favorite show. And if the dialogue is such a universal narrative tool, you can use it in your writing assignments.
In fact, you can choose the most effective way to weave a conversation into your essay using one of three ways.
Merge Character Remarks With Your Narration
This is a perfect way to include short pieces of the primary source (a book, a play, or a movie) without breaking up the flow of your paper. In this case, you should format the remarks as quotes as required by the formatting style you use. You will also need to include an in-text citation specifying the author and the page.
For example:
As Holmes commented on the death of the hound of the Baskervilles, “It’s dead, whatever it is.” (Doyle 82)
Use Block Quotes to Paste Whole Conversations
If you want to include a piece of a conversation to prove your point, a block quote is the best way to go. You will need to indent the whole piece 1 inch from the left margin and add an additional ¼ inch indent for the first line of every paragraph. Block quotes are introduced with a colon and do not need quotation marks on both sides. The author’s name and page are included after the last period.
Write Dialogue to Enhance the Story
Suppose you’re writing a narrative or personal essay or any other paper that calls for creative use of dialogue. In that case, you can include direct speech instead of reported speech to liven up the assignment and make it more clear and concise. When writing dialogue, you need to follow the correct formatting style or risk losing points off your grade. We’ll go over the major rules and differences between APA and MLA in the next section.
How to Format Dialogue in MLA and APA
Most dialogue formatting tricks are the same across MLA and APA style guides. We’ll specify the differences and similarities for every rule.
Proper Dialogue Punctuation
Double quotation marks go on both sides of every remark. Everything within the quotation marks is the direct speech of a character.
Periods, question marks, and exclamation marks go inside the quotation marks.
CORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!”
INCORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that”!
Commas are used to separate the direct speech from dialogue tags. If the tag is before the remark, the comma goes before the opening quotation mark. If the tag goes after the remark, the comma stays inside the quotation marks. You don’t need to follow other punctuation (including ellipses) with a comma.
CORRECT: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you did that!”
INCORRECT: She exclaimed: “I can’t believe you did that!”
CORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!” she exclaimed
INCORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!,” she exclaimed
Use an em dash to showcase an interrupted remark. Don’t confuse an em dash with a hyphen.
CORRECT: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you —”
“What’s there not to believe?” he interrupted
INCORRECT: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you -”
If you want to include a quote within the direct speech, use single quotation marks to indicate it.
CORRECT: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you said ‘I’ll be back’ like that!”
INCORRECT: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you said “I’ll be back” like that!”
Fun fact: In British English, the order of quotation marks is reversed. Single quotation marks surround the direct speech, and the quotes within the dialogue use double quotation marks.
Capitalization and Paragraphs
As you might have noticed in the examples above, the dialogue tags that follow the direct speech always start with a lowercase letter, whether the remark ends with a comma, a question or an exclamation mark.
CORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!” she exclaimed
INCORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!” She exclaimed
There is one exception to this rule, but that only works if the action is separate from speech, so it isn’t a dialogue tag but a part of the narration. In this case, treat it like a new sentence and separate it from the direct speech with periods.
CORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that!” She left the room in a huff. “I’m so mad!”
INCORRECT: “I can’t believe you did that,” she left the room in a huff, “I’m so mad!”
A new paragraph is a sign of a new speaker in MLA and APA both. The difference comes in how the styles treat dialogue tags. When using APA, you can start with a tag and continue the direct speech on the same line if the remark is relatively short. With MLA, you have to start a new paragraph for every remark, even if it’s a couple of words long. Every new paragraph should be indented.
MLA: She exclaimed,
“I can’t believe you did that!”
APA: She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you did that!”
When Dialogue Turns into Monologue
Let’s say one of the characters in your story decides to give a speech in the middle of a conversation. In this case, you will need to divide their remarks into paragraphs. Open each one with a quotation mark, but put a closing quotation mark only at the end of the last paragraph of the speech. Like this:
She said, “Paragraph 1.
“Paragraph 2.
“Paragraph 3.”
This applies to both MLA and APA formats.
How to Write Dialogue in an Essay and Make It Count
Now that you know how to format dialogue in a narrative essay or any other assignment, you may be wondering whether you should include it for all the hard work you have to put into a short conversation. Dialogue is necessary if it moves your story along or if it feeds character development. If the conversation does neither of these things, skip it.
If you decide to stick with dialogue, you need to do it right. It takes professional writers years to develop a perfect dialogue style, so we won’t pretend to teach you everything you need to know in a short blog post. But we can provide a couple of helpful pointers to make conversations more engaging on paper:
- Skip the tags after every remark. While a dialogue without a single tag is confusing, there is no need to clutter every line with “he said” or “she asked”.
- Liven up the tags with gestures or descriptions. Posture, facial expression, and nervous ticks add depth and meaning to the dialogue you won’t achieve with direct speech alone.
- Insert drama with powerful words. Edit the dialogue and tags and replace any words that use modifiers with exaggerated alternatives (clutch instead of hold tightly or pressed up close instead of close by).
- Break up long sentences. Read the conversation out loud and remove any words and phrases that sound too stilted or unnatural. Let your characters speak like real people do.
While there’s still plenty to talk about when it comes to direct speech, we’ll wrap up at that. Hopefully, you now understand how to write dialogue in an essay, MLA or APA style, and how to make it lively and powerful without taking a dozen writing classes. Keep our tips in mind and have fun with writing dialogue!