: Should you only use colons and full stops in dialogues? Should you only use colons and full stops in dialogues? I thought about using a semi-colon in one of my dialogues, but I had second
Should you only use colons and full stops in dialogues? I thought about using a semi-colon in one of my dialogues, but I had second thought about it, because when we talk, we don't really differentiate semi-colons from colons, so it almost in a way nonsensical to use semi-colons in dialogues. What do most authors tend to do concerning semi-colons? Is it ok to replace semi-colons with full stops? When would you personally use semi-colons?
For example:
"You need to record every action you make from now on; otherwise, the
federal agents will arrest you for questioning." she recommended.
"You need to record every action you make from now on. Otherwise, the
federal agents will arrest you for questioning." she recommended.
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@LarsenBagley300
In a written work descriptive text is intended to be read, it should convey its meaning as effectively as possible and, as Accumulation has said, the purpose of the punctuation is to help make the meaning clear, not to indicate pacing.
Dialogue is quite different. The reader is trying to understand the thoughts of the speaker, who cannot be assumed to be even trying to make his meaning clear. The reader should be trying to ignore the fact that he is reading text and concentrating on imagining what the speaker would actually sound like. In this context punctuation is concerned only with pacing and inflection. For this, I think, only comma, full stop, exclamation and question marks are useful. Some people may claim that colon and semicolon can convey subtle differences in the lengths of pauses, but I suspect that most people would associate them with lists and not find them helpful within dialogue.
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@Ogunnowo420
This may not be a popular view, but as I see it, punctuation is about meaning, and only indirectly about sound.
Speech includes a range of subtle variations in pitch, speed, volume, and pronunciation which all help to convey the intended meaning. Writing doesn't have those — and no punctuation can represent them accurately. So instead, punctuation has over time evolved to convey that meaning more directly.
(We see this in e.g. programming languages, where symbols have very precise meanings; but written language has been moving that way for centuries.)
That's why the various items of punctuation have specific uses, each expressing a different meaning. Roughly speaking:
Full stops (‘periods’ in US English) separate sentences.
Commas separate related clauses, list items, and parenthetical phrases.
Colons introduce lists, examples, and explanations.
Semicolons separate independent clauses, and also list items where one or more items themselves contain commas.
An ellipsis (‘…’) indicates a trailing-off or unfinished sentence, or an omitted section of a quote.
Dashes can introduce parenthetical phrases, and more general pauses and breaks.
So the choice of punctuation isn't random, nor based on how long a speaker would pause (though there's likely to be an indirect relationship). Instead, it depends on the exact meaning you want to convey.
And that applies whether the writing is representing someone's direct thoughts, or speech as reported in a newspaper or a novel or a script or whatever.
See for example this question. And see this page and the bottom of this page for examples of how the choice of a colon or semicolon can affect the meaning in an unfortunate way!
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@LarsenBagley300
So from your example, it sounds like the scene is a lawyer is advising a client, so with that in mind I would write the sentence:
"You need to record every action you make from now on, otherwise the federal agents will arrest you for questioning," she recommended.
Keep in mind, Dialog is less beholden to the rules of grammar because people don't talk with perfect grammar all the time. For example, the English language second person plural is "You" but I am from a part of the world where people tend to use "Y'all" for the same meaning, which is not proper English meaning... and it gets worse as the number of people being addressed in the second person plural rises... then you say "All y'all". So if I was writing my dialog, I would language that indicates my character's manner of speaking, but in my narration, I would use proper grammar (Unless it's first person, then I might make it sound like the speaker's voice).
With all that said, the reason I used commas twice. In the first case, this is because she is giving her client a rule and explaining why the rule exists. You can easily morph it into the lawyer saying "If you do not do x, then Y".
The second comma at the end of questioning requires a sentence diagram explanation, which I can't draw. As you know, sentences require a verb (action) that is done by a subject to the predicate. So the verb answers "what action is being taken?", a subject answers "who took the action?" and the predicate asks "To Whom/What is the thing that was affected by the action?. In your sample, the action is "recommend", the person recommending is "she" and the thing affected by the action is the quote dialog. "She recommended." is technically a complete sentence as you do not always need a predicate, but when writing dialog, the quotation is the predicate when paired with a speaker indication, because of this, when the subject/speaker and the verb appear after the quote, the last line closes with a comma. Depending on if you are using British English or an American may affect where you put the comma (British English puts the comma outside of quotation mark, Americans put it on the inside) and both sides agree that a period is placed at the end of the dialog tag when it comes after the quoted dialog. If the dialog tag comes before the quote, both sides will use put the comma between the end of the tag and the quotation mark, and will end with a period at the end of the quote (following the same rules as the above comma rule... and these really only matter if your teacher is grading).
I know that last part wasn't part of the question, but so I apologize for the nitpick.
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@Odierno164
For writing fiction, I don't use semicolons in dialogue (spoken or thoughts) and I don't use it in prose.
That said, I am in Galastel's camp on other forms of punctuation indicating to the reader various lengths of pauses in a character's speech, or verbalized thoughts. sometimes to take a breath, or to think -- or cut short a sentence and change their mind about what they are saying. Perhaps to hesitate before saying something crucial.
I believe in practice that this is how people actually read, that they will read those pauses and hesitations into the dialogue. The reason I don't use semicolons is I think most people are not sure what to do with them. Also, in Galastel's table, if I want a medium pause, I'll use a dash or em-dash. The semicolon is redundant.
To me there is a difference in pacing for the following sentences:
(1) "Do you want red blue or yellow?"
(2) "Do you want red, blue or yellow?"
(3) "Do you want red, blue, or yellow?"
(4) "Do you want red, blue -- or yellow?"
(5) "Do you want red, blue ... or yellow?
(1) is spoken in a rush.
(2) is normal, but (3) is spoken more deliberately slowly around the color choices to give each fair consideration, as if the person speaking is showing samples of the color, or pointing at them.
(4) has a more dramatic pause after "blue" that will emphasize "yellow", enough for the listener to notice but not to think about interrupting.
(5) the ellipsis causes a long enough pause that the listener will have a thought in-between, it seems like the speaker is mentally occupied after the word "blue", thinking or searching for something, or is more deliberately pausing for dramatic effect.
I think in practice readers "hear" dialogue and verbalized thought as spoken speech and as authors if anything is said in an unusual or unexpected matter we should indicate that with punctuation, including (very rarely) emphasis by italics. I don't think the same rules apply in prose as are applied to dialogue or verbalized thought (in italics, without quotes, but like dialogue in separate paragraphs and tagged as thoughts in non-italics).
Verbalized thought example:
That lady is bad-ass, Cheryl thought.
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@Deb2945533
Some people have some sort of dislike for semicolons. See The Good, the Bad and the Semicolon. If you're not comfortable using semicolons at all, that's up to you.
But if you do normally use semicolons, and are only not comfortable using them in dialogue, think of it this way: in dialogue, we use pauses. We do not give pauses names, we just stop for however long makes sense. In writing, we use punctuation to represent those stops, and give the punctuation marks names according to their length. Thus, we have:
Comma: a short stop
Semicolon: a medium stop
Em-dash: a medium stop
Period: a long stop
Elipsis: a really long stop
etc.
Since we do make medium stops in conversation, why shouldn't such a stop be marked by a semicolon?
Or, to think about it differently, imagine your entire novel being read out loud. (That's useful practice anyway, for multiple reasons.) A line of narration wouldn't be different from a line of dialogue then, right? Both are read out loud. So why would a semicolon belong in one place, and not the other?
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