8 Dialogue Mistakes Editors Fix Every Time: transcript

Your book is full of dialogue. You think it's formatted correctly, but if you've ever written a line like, "I'm ready," she smiled, it isn't. Smiled isn't a dialogue tag. As a book editor, I can tell within the first page of dialogue whether a writer knows the difference between a dialogue tag and an action beat. There are eight dialogue mistakes editors fix constantly in manuscripts, and you'll see why catching them yourself matters. When you hand over a dialogue that hasn't been self-edited, you're paying professional rates for comma fixes you could have caught yourself, and your editor's attention goes to simple formatting instead with the scenes you actually struggle with.

Number one, a comma in front of an action. "I'm ready," {comma} she smiled. This is the one I fix the most. Here's the simplest explanation I can give as our foundation. The dialogue and its dialogue tag are one sentence, and the comma is what joins them. So, using our example, that comma is telling your reader that smiling is how those words came out. You can't smile a sentence. You can smile then talk, and you can talk while you're smiling, but the smile itself does not make sound. The fix is a period. "I'm ready," {period} then a capital S for your new sentence. She smiled. Now it's two sentences. The spoken words come first, and then she smiles. Nodded work the same way along with anything else your characters do with their faces or their shoulders while they're talking. Here's how to find these without rereading your whole book. Search your manuscript for a comma and a closing quotation mark. Then a space and the word she. Do it again with he, and then with every character's

name. Every hit is a line of dialogue with something hanging off the comma. Read the verb in each one and ask whether a mouth can do that to make words. Said is fine. Nodded is not. It gets period. Some hits will have said followed by something more, like, "She said, her voice barely audible." Leave those alone for now. We'll discuss them in number four. Most of the list will go fairly fast for you until you have something like, "She sighed." And a sigh actually does come out of your mouth, but that brings us to number two. Sound words stretched over a whole line. Sigh is one of a handful of words that sit halfway between a tag and an action. The style guide my editors work from list sigh, gasp, chuckle, grunt, hiss, spat, and breathed under use your best judgment. They all make sounds, so they can work as a tag, but only when the line is short. "Fine," {comma} she sighed. That works. It's one word on one breath out, and you can actually do it.

Now this one. "I've asked you every night this week to take the trash out," she sighed. You try to sigh that whole sentence. You run out of a sigh somewhere around this week, and the rest comes out in your regular voice. That's the test for every word on this list. Perform them all. If you can gasp the whole line, gasped is working as a tag. But if you're out of breath halfway through, it's an action, and it needs its own sentence. There are two ways to fix this. You can put the sigh first. She sighed, {period} and then the whole line. Or you can give the sigh a word.

"Seriously," she sighed, {period} Then the rest of her dialogue starts as its own sentence. How short is short enough is up to you. Our style guide tells my editors to use their best judgment on these, and I'd tell you the same thing. A gasp can work for O. A chuckle can apply to nice try. This may feel nitpicky, but we've all paused on an action in a book and wondered how it was possible or even reenacted it to ourselves. If you do this work now, these details won't hold your readers up later. Number three. Two people in one paragraph. "I'm ready," Riley said. Jake nodded. "Let's go." All in one paragraph. There's no way to know who says let's go. It could be Riley finishing his thought or Jake answering him. So your reader has to guess. I correct this one constantly in so so many manuscripts. A paragraph break is how a reader keeps track of whose turn it is. Anytime somebody new speaks or moves, they start a new paragraph, even if all they do is nod. And where you put the break decides who said what. If Jake

says, "Let's go." his nod and his line share a paragraph. If it's Riley, Jake's nod sits by itself and let's go starts a new one. Same words, different speaker, and the only thing that changed is where you hit enter. In a long back and forth with no tags, those breaks are doing the work of telling the reader who's talking. With my authors, I call it a visual cue. One action in the wrong paragraph and suddenly your readers think it's opposite character speaking. Print a scene or chapter from your current manuscript. Go through it paragraph by paragraph and put a tick or check mark in the margin for every character who speaks or does anything in each paragraph. Two ticks or more means you split it at least once. Don't take it too far, though. One person's dialogue and everything they do around it stay together. Riley grabbed his coat. "I'm leaving." That's one tick, so it's one paragraph. The only time I'll split a single character is when what they do next is a new moment. Say Riley is halfway out the door and stops. That

stop can get its own paragraph because the scene just turned. That's a judgment call. Number four, a body part doing the talking. We're back to commas for a minute. "I'm ready," {comma} her eyes met his. This one's close to number one, but it's a little worse. With she smiled, at least the person smiling is the person talking. Here, the grammar says her eyes did the talking. There's also a version with no real verb at all. "Hold on," {comma} her hands trembling. Her hands trembling can't stand on its own as a sentence, so it's just hanging off the end of the line. Both get the same fix as number one. A period and then a real sentence. "I'm ready. Her eyes met his." "Hold on. Her hands trembled." Trembling turns into trembled and now it's a whole sentence. Now, remember those search results I told you to leave for later? Some of them look like this. "I'm ready," she said, her voice barely audible. That one's written correctly. Her voice barely audible is about the speaking itself. So, it can ride along after said with a comma. But, you're looking closely at what that

extra phrase describes. If it's her voice, her breath, or her tone, a comma after said is fine. If it's anything else her body is doing, it gets a period and its own sentence. In our style guide, that remains even when said is right there. So, she said, "Her voice trembling." stays. And she said, "Her hands trembling." gets split because her hands have nothing to do with how the words sounded. Number five, fancy tags and redundancy. "You're right." she agreed. If number one is the mistake I fix most, this one is right behind it.

Let's read it again. "You're right." is already agreeing. So, the tag is telling you something the line just told you. Replied and answered do the same thing. Because if somebody just asked a question, the reader can tell whether the next line is an answer. And the tag's just telling them again. The same goes for "Watch out." he exclaimed. The exclamation point did the exclaiming. You do not need to tell the reader again with a tag. Said and asked are the tags readers slide right past. I know, why use asked when the question mark already implies a question? I agree. You do not always need a dialogue tag on a question. So, when the speaker is clear or obvious, don't use one at all. But, when you do, asked is the most appropriate for a question. Anything beyond said or asked will stand out more to the reader or worse, make them pause.

And when the tag only repeats what the line already communicated, that pause gives them nothing new. I already explained how to run a search on your tags back in number one. This time, run the search and look at the tags that aren't said or asked. Cover the tag with your thumb and read the line by itself. If the line already tells you how it was said, change the tag to said. Or cut it entirely if it's still clear who's talking. If cutting it leaves the reader unsure, put it back. It's whole job is telling the reader who's talking. So, let's not lose sight of that. Our style guide at Golden Editorial recommends to use others sparingly. So, here's what sparingly looks like. "I know what you did," she whispered. Those exact words could be shouted from across a room.

Whispered tells you that she's close and maybe that nobody else is supposed to hear. The line can't tell you that by itself. So, the tag stays. Number six is the mirror image of number one. A real tag cut off from its line. "I'm ready," period, capital S, she said. This time the tag's perfect, but the period cuts it off from its line. Read she said by itself and it sounds unfinished because what she said is on the other side of that period. When the tag needs the dialogue to make sense, the two of them are one sentence. So, the period becomes a comma and the tag stays lower case.

Question marks and exclamation points work a little differently. Those stay. The tag after them still starts lower case though because it's still the same sentence. "Are you coming?" he asked, lower case H right after the question mark. To find these, search for a period, a closing quotation mark, a space, and she with a capital S with match case turned on. So, it skips every lower case S in your main script. Then, do H for he and your character names. Anything that comes up that has said or asked gets the comma. Anything else, like she grabbed her coat, is an action and it's already correct as its own sentence. Number seven, a tag splitting the dialogue. "I'm ready," she said, "let's go." Commas on both side of the tag and a lower case L. Maybe it looks tidy to some, but I'm ready and let's go are two separate sentences and those commas force them to run together. Read it the way it's punctuated and it's one long breath. We correct this by placing a period after the tag and a capital on the next word. "I'm ready," she said, period, "let's go," capital L. Here's

how you tell which one you need. Take the tag out and read what's left. "I'm ready, let's go." That's two sentences, so you need the period. Compare this. "If you're ready," she said, "we'll go." Take the tag out and you get if you're ready, will go, which is one sentence. So, the commas are right and will stays lower case. And if the phrase in the middle is an action like she picked up her keys, skip the test. For the purpose of this video, it gets periods every time because the action isn't part of the dialogue sentence. Number eight, thoughts and written text get italicized. What am I doing here? Hannah thought, in quotation marks. I correct this in so many manuscripts. Quotation marks tell the reader those words were said out loud. Thoughts go in italics with no quotation marks. Once it's in italics, she thought is optional because the italics already tell the reader it's a thought. To find these, search for the word thought and then wondered. Anywhere one of them follows a closing quotation mark, that line needs italics. Single

quotes for thoughts get the same fix. Inside dialogue, single quotes have one job, which is a quote inside a quote. She told me, "Never again." and she meant it. Text the character is reading, like a letter, a text message, or a sign, normally gets italicized as well. This signals to the reader it's not being spoken aloud, but what's italicized is as the character is reading it. There's one gray area and it's words a character remembers somebody actually saying. Say Nicole's mother always told her to slow down and breathe, and now mid-scene she remembers it again. In our style guide, that gets italics and quotation marks. The italics are because it's happening in her head.

The quotation marks are because somebody really did say it out loud at one point. You don't have to follow the Golden Editorial Style Guide on this one. Other editors and some publishers might handle recalled dialogue differently. Whatever you choose, put it in your own style sheet, which is just a running list of the choices you've made for this book, and do it the same way every time. Consistency is key. When dialogue formatting is done well, it's the part of your writing nobody notices because they get to focus on your story instead of how you wrote it. Every mistake on this list makes the reader notice it and while they're noticing, they've stopped thinking about your scene. My free self-editing guide picks up where this video leaves off with more of the gritty details that you can work on before your manuscript ever gets to an editor. It's pinned in the comment. And if you have any other questions about dialogue formatting, drop it in the comments and I might address it in a future video.

See you next week.