Explain to students that a dialogue is a conversation between two or more characters. Dialogue is not exactly like real speech, but it should serve the purpose of the conversation. Omit words and phrases that don’t serve the conversation’s purpose.
- Don’t try to provide too much information at once through dialogue.
- Break up dialogue with action. “Come here,” he walked to open the door.
- Don’t try too hard to vary your tag lines when writing dialogue.
- Don’t use profanity and slang when writing dialogue.
- Read widely, noting both good and bad dialogues. Listen to how people talk to each other (real life dialogues). Punctuate dialogue correctly, use quotation marks for a speaker’s exact words, capitalize the first letter of the direct quotation, start a new line.
