My friends at Custom-Writing have gathered 28 the most common ‘boring’ words and selected a number of alternatives you can use instead.
Those alternatives could make your spoken and written conversations way more varied and exciting.
You can find all of this goodness in the infographic below:
Via: https://custom-writing.org/assignment-writing-services#boring-words
You’re in the thick of writing some characters’ conversations and it hits you: where do the commas go? Do you need one after an exclamation mark? How’s it supposed to look on the page?
We’ve broken down some dialogue into it’s simplest parts with our step-by-step, visual tutorial covering punctuation, dialogue tags, descriptors, and formatting.
“When you’re writing your work and submitting it to places, you’ll look a lot more professional and it’ll be less work for your editor to go back and fix up those nitty-gritty bits…”
Dialogue is something that you can easily get wrong with just one comma out of place. Check out the video in full by following this link:
Video: Master Dialogue Punctuation
What to Take Away From This Video:
- Punctuation should always be inside the quotation marks.
- The simple comma is your friend! Use it when tying up speech around dialogue tags (the old favourite, ‘s/he said’).
- Each line of dialogue should be on a new line; keep the formatting nice and clean.
A great exercise is to pick two or three books (ones that you love!) and find some examples of dialogue. Each book may be slightly different in their smaller details, but it’s handy to see the basics of punctuation in action.
The best way to learn, of course, is by writing some dialogue yourself. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, because practice makes perfect!
This week Writer’s Blog will be exploring literary devices to help you along with your writing. Literary devices are techniques and structures writers employ to convey their message and story. When done well, the use of literary devices can alter, manipulate and challenge the way a reader perceives any work. Used masterfully, literary devices influence how a story or essay can be interpreted and analysed, as well as how much the reader enjoys the work. Today’s device is Dialogue:
How To Master Dialogue
What is dialogue?
“Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.” – Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction
Not all of the following are used together, however, dialogue consists of four main elements:
- Spoken words – the direct speech or the words within the quote marks.
- Speech tags – the words that tell the reader who is speaking and how they are speaking.
- Actions of the speaker – a description of the speaking character’s actions before, during and after speech.
- Thoughts or emotional state of the speaker – a description of the speaking character’s emotional state before, during and after speech.
When characters start talking to each other, the story comes to life. A reader can gain a far deeper understanding of a character through their words and actions than they can from the narrative text. A couple of sentences of dialogue can reveal much about the background of a particular character. Are they wealthy or poor? What is their country of origin? Have they been well-educated? Are they feeling happy or sad? All of these questions can be answered with effective dialogue.
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What should dialogue do?
- Reveal emotions
- Draw the reader into the characters’ lives
- Show the reader how the character reacts to different situations, such as pressure, intimacy, hate, love or fear
- Move the story forward – every piece of dialogue should have a purpose
- Hint at or tell of coming events
- Give balance to a story after a long section of narrative
- Increase the pace of the story
- Contribute humour
- Reflect the changes in emotions and lifestyle of your characters
What should dialogue not do?
- Summarise action that could otherwise be exciting
- Force-feed information to the reader – tell a character something they would already know, purely to fill in background to the reader
- Act as padding to achieve a word count
- Ramble on without the characters learning anything knew or achieving something
- Sound exactly like real speech, with interruptions, rambling, repetitions and stutters, although these have their place
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Tips for Writing Dialogue
Remember, most people speak quite simply. If you dress up a character’s speech too much it will sound unrealistic.
“If you are using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.” – John Steinbeck
Better yet, grab a few friends and act it out, taking note of the speech tags and the actions of the speaker. This can be very entertaining and you’ll be able to see very quickly where your dialogue falls down.
Now over to you.
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