Narrative Writing: Dialogue

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

Writing about a personal experience is one form of narrative writing.

The best narrative writing makes an experience come alive for the reader. It can be something funny that happened to you or a story about a favorite person or place.

In this lesson, you will write a story from the first-person point of view, meaning you will be telling the story about yourself using the words I, me, my, or mine. You want your verbs to show action and your adjectives to be descriptive.

When you tell your story, you can add dialogue to make your story more interesting. Dialogue refers to words characters speak to each other in a story.

Using dialogue in your story does the following.

• It shows something about a speaker’s personality.
• It adds details.
• It keeps the action moving.

Think about what the people in your story say to each other. Make your dialogue sound real.

Take out a piece of paper and pencil. As you watch the video below, write down why and how you use dialogue and what a speech tag is in dialogue.

• Why do you use dialogue in narrative writing?

It is used to move your story forward. It is also used so your reader can better understand the characters in your story.

• How do you use dialogue in narrative writing?

You must put quotation marks around the words spoken by the character. For example: Mary said, “I want to go shopping with you!”

A direct quote must begin with a capital letter.

When you write dialogue, the end punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. For example: Joe said, “Hurry, I want to get an ice cream cone!”

Do not put a period at the end of a quotation; use a comma unless it is the end of the sentence. For example:

• “I will go with you,” said Bill.
• Bill said, “I will go with you.”

Begin a new paragraph when a new person or character begins to speak. For example:

“I want to go home,” said Jill.

Mother said, “Alright, go and get in the car.”

“Thanks, Mom,” said Jill.

Remember, quotation marks go before the first word a character speaks and after the last word the character speaks. Use a comma to separate the speaker tag from the quote.

Continue to the Got It? section to practice punctuating dialogue.