Apparently A Lot Of People Get Dialogue Punctuation Wrong Despite Having An Otherwise Solid Grasp Of

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

I cleaned up some backgrounds for screenshot edit purposes would love to be linked if used just so I can see your art :3c

best trope and you can fight me over it (i abuse this so hard with my ocs)

How many asexual/aromantic people do you reckon still think they “haven’t found the right person yet”

How many do you think thought that in all of human history

How many do you think forced themselves into relationships and whole marriages by thinking “this is how it’s supposed to go right? this is how I’m supposed to behave and this is how it’s supposed to feel? this is what I’m feeling right?”

and how many do you think wound up just thinking there was something wrong with them and wound up fucking miserable their whole lives

I hope there were some that didn’t. Some that found kinships of other types, maybe of others who felt the same way. Maybe just friends and family.

I know we’ve always been here. I know we’ve survived. It’s disheartening that we’ll never quite realize how many, but I hope cataloguing ourselves now will help others in the future not feel so alone.

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

“their relationship is strictly platonic” “they’re so in love” well, more importantly, they are fucking weird and abnormal about each other in an undeniable way