: 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

@LarsenBagley300

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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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