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Writing Tips

Punctuating Dialogue

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➸ “This is a sentence.”

➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.

➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”

➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”

➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”

➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”

➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.

“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.

“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”

➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”

➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”

However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!

➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.

If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)

➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“

“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.

➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.

➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”

➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.

“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”

➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.

“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”

“Lilith and Eve" by SAYAE Heroika Arts, 2018

Бачив нещодавно веселе:

лишу це туть

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

#Kyjiv #rent

Шукається двох- (або більше) кімнатна квартира біля м. Дарниця (десь +- в області як на малюнку).

З вимог: — 2-4 поверх; — можливість оренди з тваринами (пташки); — швидкий інтернет; — бойлер/пралка/духовка/кондюк (або дозвіл на їх встановлення); — нормальне спальне ліжко (чи домовленість про його придбання/вивіз дивану тощо); — відсутність неадекватних сусідів.

Балкон, велика ванна — суттєвий плюс.

Хотілося б зняти в когось із умовно знайомих. Може, хтось з присутніх думав про те, щоб здати свою в хороші руки? Або знає пристойну, яка скоро звільняється?

«Лайк, репост, дзвіночок»™.

Living through genocide in this day and age is so deeply weird. I cried on the train today while listening to Halsey because I casually decided to go on Twitter and first thing I saw there was the photos of the bodies they found in Izyum. I go on Tumblr and I reblog every post about it in between photos of gorgeous actresses. I go on Twitter and I laugh at memes while thinking about the woman from my hometown the Russians killed and then dumped her body in the central street and no one dared to get her for hours, I`m thinking about the blue and yellow bracelet, I`m thinking about Bucha, I`m trying to imagine just how many it is - 80k dead in Mariupol, I`m thinking about how am I gonna keep living with a hole in my heart, and then I go back to liking pretty pictures online. 

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #62

Brought to you by a marine biologist who has a pen…and has a pineapple…

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST

Tell me if I’m referencing memes that are too old and watch me not care. Anyway, let’s go over the Sea Pineapple, because I bet you don’t know really what it is, and tbh, I didn’t for a second either. But it turns out it is a type of Sea Squirt, and therefore, of all the invertebrates in the game, we, as vertebrates, are most closely related to this thing. I’ll explain in a minute:

We here on Northern Hemisphere islands are able to dive for this thing all day and night, so if you haven’t caught one yet, just give it some time. Then, when you give your first one to Blathers, it’s put into the big coastal tank underneath the coral reef tank and it just…sits there. Which is totally understandable, considering this animal - yes, it’s an animal - lives a sessile life, meaning it attaches to something and stays there. It also filter feeds, so you see its little siphons opening and closing. 

The Sea Pineapple is a real animal, Halocynthia roretzi and it’s eaten primarily in Korea and less so in Japan, despite the fact that a lot people say it tastes like not-food. But, hey, humans will eat anything.

So, Sea Pineapples are a kind of Sea Squirt, aka a Tunicate, a soft, squishy that sits on the seafloor and filter feeds. But despite this thing not having a face or an interesting lifestyle, the fact remains we’re more closely related to it than we are to the cooler invertebrates, like insects, worms, or octopuses. They belong in the Phylum Chordata with us, the even-more-interesting vertebrates. Now, I’m gonna try REAL HARD not to go off on a nerd-tastic tangent, but this is one of my favorite topics - chordate phylogeny.  

So, what’s a Chordate? It is not synonymous with “vertebrate” although lots of us in the phylum are vertebrates. All animals in this phylum have 5 very distinct features that no other group has, either during our whole lives or part of our lives (that includes larval or embryonic stages). They are:

A post-anal tail, meaning our bodies extend past our anus.

We have a notochord, aka what my professor called “the stiffening rod of the body”. In humans, this is our spine.

A dorsal neural tube that, in us vertebrates, is the spinal cord, the main communication highway of the nervous system.

An endostyle/thyroid gland. 

Pharyngeal slits, which often become gills in adult stages of chordates.

Although the Sea Pineapple doesn’t look like it has any of these features, its larvae do, which puts them in the same phylum as us vertebrates. Wild, huh?And this list of features puts us together with some weird stuff, the weirdest has to be tunicates, as shown by this phylogenetic tree:

^From this site. This should look kind of familiar since a stylized one is on the floor of the fossil section of the museum. I’ll do a special fish-explained to talk about that and how to read one of these. But basically, every node, or intersection of the branches represents the last common ancestor of the groups at the end of the branches. Once you can read these, you start to find out some very interesting, and mind-blowing facts, like, we’re all just derived fish and that birds evolved from dinosaurs and whales are most closely related with hoofed mammals and we’re related to boring tunicates instead of cooler things, like horseshoe crabs. 

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

Кстати, Лорд Витинари, верховный правитель Анк-Морпорка, очень любил музыку.

Людям страшно хотелось узнать, какая именно музыка могла привлечь такого человека. Заформализованная камерная музыка, может быть? Или громомечущие оперы?

На самом же деле он предпочитал стиль, исключающий исполнение. Любое исполнение, полагал он, подвергает музыку издевательствам, заключая её в высушенные шкуры, останки дохлых кошек и куски металла, расплющивает её в проволоку и трубки. Она должна оставаться на бумаге, в виде рядов маленьких точек и крючков, аккуратно сидящих на линейке. Только в таком виде она чиста. Она начинает гнить сразу же как только люди дотрагиваются до неё.

Куда лучше спокойно сидеть в комнате и читать ноты — ничто не встаёт между тобой и замыслом композитора, кроме росчерков пера. Слушать её в исполнении потных жирных мужиков, у которых из ушей растут волосы, а с гобоев капает слюна… сама мысль об этом вызывала у него содрогание. Хотя и не очень сильное, поскольку он никогда и ничего не доводил до крайности.

(«Ро ́ковая музыка», Терри Пратчетт)

Besides, Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.

People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man. Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightning opera scores.

In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.

-Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

based on a true story