Proofreading step 1: Dialogue formatting
Pop-quiz, how do you format dialogue?
You proably ‘sorta’ know, right?
“It’s like this, right?” they said.
Yep, that’s right.
‘cept how do you split dialogue up?
“Well…” they said, thinking a while before answering, “You use commas, don’t you?”
Mm-hmm, good job! Except that actually took me quite a while to figure out. I kept wanting to do this:
“In fairness”, They said, feeling a little defensive; “I don’t think this looks too bad.”
And I still don’t. But at the same time it doesn’t look quite right. And anyway it’s wrong. At least it probably is.
I was trying to find style guides relatively early on and even asked around on some forums, but sadly what I came back with is there are lots of rules.
Not using semicolons is pretty universal - that’s just a bad habit of mine. However I found several cases which said you end dialogue with a “ followed by a capital letter even in interruptions.
To the best I can find, the above is the The Chicago Manual of Style’s dialogue format. So that’s what I’m going with.
So the first part of my final proofreading (or, well - probably the first part of my first final proofreading) was to run spellcheck over the entire document once and then to go through every dialogue section with a fine-toothed comb to discover all the formatting mistakes I’d made.
An example.
Before:
“Oh fuck.” Sylvain looked at the floor in distress. “Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!” He then continued, his voice rising to shriek in panic at the end. The general remained quiet, waiting for him to regain his composure. “How did this happen?” He finally asked; “And why now?”
And after:
“Oh fuck.” Sylvain looked at the floor in distress, “Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!” he then continued, his voice rising to shriek in panic at the end. The general remained quiet, waiting for him to regain his composure. “How did this happen?” he finally asked, “And why now?”
Another example, before:
"That's your ship?" Washoe twitched her head in the direct of the thick glass window through which you could just make out a path of grey hull.
"Yes,” Beckett began; “That's my ship, Fat-"
"Wrong," She interrupted him sharply: "That's the cargo ship Fatima, registration OHO-188p and as long as she is docked in my bay that's my ship until you decide to leave, is that clear Mister Souze?" The tone in her voice conveyed that there was a wrong and a right answer and that getting them mixed up would incur a penalty.
And after:
"That's your ship?" Washoe twitched her head in the direct of the thick glass window through which you could just make out a path of grey hull.
"Yes,” Beckett began, “That's my ship, Fat-"
"Wrong," she interrupted him sharply, "That's the cargo ship Fatima, registration OHO-188p and as long as she is docked in my bay that's my ship until you decide to leave, is that clear Mister Souze?" The tone in her voice conveyed that there was a wrong and a right answer and that getting them mixed up would incur a penalty.
A lot of that.
I’m also not consistent - or at least I wasn’t. Sometimes I would use the semicolons, sometimes the commas. Anyway that’s what proofreading is for, right?
What did help me was an explanation I found on a writing blog, which was that the reason you write QUOTATION MARK - DIALOGUE - QUOTATION MARK - INTERRUPTING TEXT - COMMA - QUOTATION MARKS is that the sentence doesn’t end with the interrupting text - the dialogue is part of the sentence until the person has finished speaking. That helped a lot. I still worry that there are times when I end a sentence inapproriately, but I should have cleared most of the issues by now at least.
So, first step of my proofreading is done which feels great! Next up is going to be just a careful read-through in general trying to catch errors not picked up by the spellcheck and looking for common repetitions (and I fear there’ll be a lot of the latter).
But it feels fantastic to have gotten started.
Thanks for reading!
/Pontus