This article will teach you everything you need about dialogue writing, types of dialogues in an essay, and formatting. Furthermore, this article contains several examples of English dialogue essays and dialogue between two characters.
What is a Dialogue in an Essay?
Dialogue is as straightforward as it gets. Dialogue is a conversation or discussion between two or more characters in a book, play, or film. Let me tell you, if you’re wondering where the surprise comes in: it’s not just any conversation. Dialogue in an essay must convey some conflict, emotional tension, surprising fact, or intriguing turn of events. Essay dialogues are not focused on mundane topics because they are uninteresting to read about.
There are several things you should NOT include in your dialogue, including:
- Throat-clearing sentences – dialogue segments that add nothing to the plot
- Rambling – this is the least relevant and exciting type of dialogue, and your readers will most likely ignore it.
- Words like “um,” “hm,” “like,” “sorta,” and “kinda” – while it is essential to speak your readers’ language to engage them, avoid making them feel like they are listening to a street conversation.
- Profanities and slang – keep it classy rather than crass.
It is rare to hear people speaking in real life like the characters in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, but that doesn’t mean dialogues shouldn’t be refined to sound realistic.
Dialogue in an essay format
There are two ways to convey the characters’ words in an essay to the readers: active and passive dialogue. Quotes and quotation marks are used in active dialogue, whereas a passive dialogue involves paraphrasing quotes and telling them from the narrator.
Dialogue in the essay example:
• Active dialogue essay example
“Joanna, can you take the kids to your mother tonight?” Peter inquired.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ll drive them there as soon as they get home from school.”
• Passive dialogue essay example
Peter asked Joanna if she could take the kids to her mother tonight. Joanna was exhausted from the long ride, but she agreed anyway, hoping to avoid the difficult conversation she needed to have with her husband.
We can see from these short dialogues that active dialogue allows readers to imagine the situation better. In contrast, passive dialogue can provide more details simply by adding extra facts to the narration.
How to add dialogue in an essay
Dialogue in an essay paints a more vivid picture for the audience. How to write dialogue in an essay knowledge and act serves the following purposes:
- Providing additional information about characters
- Revealing interesting or surprising plot twists and details about the story
- Attracting readers’ attention
Dialogues can help you convey a lot of information about the story and characters in a short amount of time. Adding descriptions of how or why people say something is the key to describing their behavior.
How to Write a Dialogue Essay
Let’s get to the most exciting part of writing dialogue: punctuation and formatting. When you come across dialogue in a narrative essay or text, the punctuation may appear to have a variety of styles, which can be confusing.
Of course, common English errors apply here, but dialogues have developed their own punctuation rules.
How to format dialogue in narrative essay steps and tips:
• Commas, exclamation marks, and question marks are enclosed in quotation marks in a dialogue
“How did you do it?” Moving a couch across the room is not a fourteen-year-old girl’s job!” Diane’s mother screamed in despair.
“These macaroons are simply divine!” “I’d appreciate it if you could give me a recipe,” my aunt inquired.
“This movie was so terrifying that I couldn’t look at the screen!” her son exclaimed after seeing Jaws.
• Set off dialogue tags with commas, such as “he said” or “she exclaimed”
“Enough of this,” he exclaimed, “I’m sick of repairing this car!” I’d instead save my money and buy a new one.”
“Pepsi has too much sugar in it; it’s diabetes in a can,” the grandmother lamented.
“I’ve been reading The New York Times for years,” said the teacher. “This newspaper has never let me down.”
• If your quotation comes at the end of a sentence, include a period inside the quotation marks
“I have no idea why my car keys are in the fridge,” Uncle Joe said, frowning and scratching his brow.
“I never left the wet towel on the bathroom floor,” he told her, the biggest lie he’d ever told.
“Daddy, I’ve never seen a black and white horse,” Sarah said, pointing to the zebra.
Take note of the following: if a single person’s speech requires more than one paragraph, use opening quotation marks at the beginning, but do not use closing quotation marks until the end.
Example:
My new neighbor is always the most eager to tell me about her perfumes. “How did you come to like and wear perfumes?” I asked her one day.
“I’ve always wondered where perfumes came from,” she replied. Our scent preferences, experience with different smells, and scent associations have contributed to this massive industry’s growth. This is most likely related to our evolution as a species, where detecting specific smells means choosing safe food. Until recently, I had never worn perfume, but I had admired them from afar. I now have a small fragrance collection. “I’ve learned much about the fragrance industry and perfumery notes.”
How to Write a Two-Character Dialogue
The rules are as follows:
- Give your characters a setting. Like in movies, the setting is often as important as the dialogue. Set the scene for the dialogue by describing where and when it takes place. This will assist your readers in visualizing the scene more vividly.
- Maintain realism. There is no need to be a smarty pant and write dialogues with words and scientific facts that are difficult for an average reader to understand unless it suits your essay style. Reread a dialogue several times to ensure that it does not make you think, “Nobody talks like that!”
- Allow the conversation to flow naturally. Put yourself in the shoes of your characters and consider how you would react to something said to you. This is how you will find a way to make the dialogue appear natural and seamless.
- Please don’t overdo it. While the dialogue is an excellent tool for an essay, turning it into a play script with only quotes is another blunder to avoid.
- Make your characters believable. Include feelings and emotions in the dialogue from the narrator and the dialogue itself. Allow your audience to comprehend the tone and mood of the dialogue.
- Give the conversation a goal. By all means, a debate over whether a cake is tasty or not can be passionate, emotional, and tense. However, this is not something to bring up in a conversation. Your dialogue should serve a purpose in the plot and impact the characters involved.
- Make sure to identify who is who. This may appear to be a rookie error in writing dialogue in an essay, but it happens. Have you ever read a long dialogue and lost track of who was speaking?
It is simple in a dialogue between two characters since the readers do not need to remember the many names or attributes.
If you use any of these, mention them earlier in the text to avoid confusion.
Following these guidelines will assist you in writing a significant dialogue between two characters and will assist readers in understanding additional information about them, such as their mood, features, preferences, role in the story, and relationships between them.
How to quote dialogue in an essay
After a long day at work, John arrived home. It was raining cats and dogs, and his raincoat was utterly soaked. He entered, opened the door, and placed his bag on the floor. His phone abruptly began to ring. John pulled it from his pocket and picked it up.
“It burned down, Dad… “I’m so sorry,” he said as he heard his daughter’s sad voice. She was sobbing.
“What are you on about?! “Jen, are you okay?”
“Dad, your summer cottage burned to the ground,” she was distraught.
“How did this happen?” John inquired.
“It was just an accident, Dad.” Jen replied, “You must have left the fire in the fireplace.”
Even though his daughter might have thought he was upset by the loss, John sighed with relief at this point. She had no idea her father had insured their summer cottage, and the word “accident” meant lining his pockets with insurance money.
Conclusion
So, you now have everything you need to write dialogue in an essay successfully! Still, I strongly advise you to consider whether you need it — even when tutors assign such creative writing, they are very meticulous in their evaluation. Furthermore, pay attention to editing — dialogues are a never-ending source of student errors due to sophisticated punctuation. We also offer a narrative essay with dialogue and also provide dialogue in a narrative essay example. You can always contact us for more information on dialogue essays.
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