: Re: 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

@Deb2945533

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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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