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Punctuating dialogue, for reasons I fail to understand completely, is one of the hardest things for my fiction-writing students to master. Autocorrect inserts a capital after any form of so-called terminal punctuation, so “Are you going out?” he asked becomes “Are you going out?” He asked. Certain that the verb accompanying the speaker’s name is the dialogue tag, many students write, She laughed, “That’s a funny joke.” Master classes on the rules, the craft, and the art of punctuating dialogue make some impression, but deeply confused students often default to abjuring any sort of punctuation: “I think I’ll go out” he said “after I’ve done the laundry.”
Almost all conventions regarding punctuation in dialogue rely on common sense. If the quoted speech is part of the sentence as a whole, the punctuation between it and the dialogue tag should not be terminal, nor should the first letter of the tag be capitalized. If the speaker is interrupted, a dash could go before the quotation mark; if the speaker’s tag interrupts the speech, dashes should lie outside punctuation marks. And so on.
But the simplest and most basic mark of punctuation we associate with dialogue receives almost no scrutiny, even though the basis of the convention is the hardest to discern. I refer to the comma.
The verb said, for starters, is a transitive verb. We don’t simply say; we always say something. Generally, we don’t like to separate transitive verbs from their objects with commas, any more than we separate subjects from verbs with commas. You would not, for instance, write He hit, Bobby or I steered, my 10-foot catamaran around the shoals before landing safely in the harbor. Yet the convention of using a comma to initiate a line of quoted speech has so hardened into a rule that three out of four undergraduates, by my estimate, will insert commas before anything in quotes. Thus we get:
Hemingway wrote, “Hills like White Elephants.”
I liked, “The Lottery” better than, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”
Before making, “Castello Cavalcanti” Wes Anderson had never filmed a commercial.
Monet’s, “Impression Sunrise” is one of his most famous paintings.
It’s easy enough, I suppose, to instruct students to use commas before quoted speech and not before titles. But handing them a rule doesn’t provide a rationale. Moreover, we can all think of instances of quoted speech that don’t call for commas.
He’s the kind of guy who says “Whatever” to whatever you propose.
You say “Come home this minute” every time I ask if I can stay out late.
The judgment call regarding such commas is illustrated in this very post. In my first paragraph, I followed the introductory word write with a comma; in the fourth paragraph, I left it without. I made this apparently inconsistent choice instinctively, and my editor did not change it. James Harbeck, who writes the blog Sesquiotica, expresses the rationale for comma use in dialogue sensitively if not succinctly:
When the quoted material is within a narrative frame—even if it’s the only thing in the narrative frame—and we’re being taken to the scene, as it were, a comma is generally used. But when the quoted material is being treated as an instance of an utterance of that phrase, and the verb is the main thing rather than being an entrance point to dialogue (in other words, when the quoted material is truly the complement of the verb rather than an act of locution introduced), a comma is not called for.
You can find illustrative examples in his “Commas Before Quotes” post. The essential element here, I think—and the one I try to impress on students, if they’re not too glazed-eyed to listen—is that dialogue tag words (said, shouted, whisper, write, and so on) can take us to the scene. The comma is the curtain parting, letting the drama emerge. If the descriptive quality of the verb takes precedence over the dramatic emergence of the speech, the comma is a distraction and a hindrance.
It’s a long explication, not a short rule. But sometimes the long way around is the only way in.