Common Punctuation in Dialogue

• When dialogue ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark, put the punctuation inside the quotation mark:

                  “Sam came by to see you.”

                  “Come home with me?”

                  “I hate you!”

• When punctuating dialogue with commas and an attribution before the dialogue, the comma goes after the attribution, and the appropriate punctuation mark goes inside the quotation mark at the end of the dialogue:

                  Mom said, “Sam came by to see you.”

• When punctuating dialogue with commas and adding an attribution after the dialogue, the comma goes inside the quotation mark:

                  “She came home with me,” Will said.

• When you’re punctuating dialogue with commas and adding a pronoun attribution, the comma goes inside the quotation mark, and the pronoun is not capitalized:

                  “I hate you,” she said.

• With dialogue that trails away, as though the speaker has gotten distracted, use an ellipsis inside the quotation mark:

                  “I just don’t know …” Jenny said.

• When dialogue is abruptly interrupted or cut off, use an em-dash inside the quotation mark:

                  “Well, I don’t think—”

                  “Because you never think!”

• For a non-dialogue beat to break up a line of dialogue, use either commas or em-dashes:

                  “And then I realized,” Jane said with a sigh, “that he lied to me.”

                  “Without the antidote”—Matt shook his head—“I don’t think we can save him.”

• When the speaker has started to say one thing, and changed his or her mind to say something else, use the em-dash:

                  “I don’t want to—I mean, I won’t hurt her.”