Creating Dialogue
Dialogue is another skill with which students often struggle. They often clump dialogue all together in one big paragraph, or they skip quotation marks, or they forget to indent every time someone speaks. Almost all of them will repeatedly use "said" or even, " _____ was like" in place of dialogue tags.
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There are many resources available to refresh students memories about the syntactic rules, but here are few that are easily accessible:
2. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/punctuating-dialogue-properly-in-fiction-writing-1277721
3. https://ifp.12writing.com/2011/03/dialogue-grammar-and-syntax-in-fiction.html
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After reviewing the rules, students need to practice AND they need to see good dialogue in action. Look for stories that 1) demonstrate realistic vernacular, 2) utilize a variety of dialogue tags or even skip some dialogue tags completely, 3) build character's personalities through the dialogue.
I like "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier and almost anything by Langston Hughes. There are many, many stories that work well for this.
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Once the teacher has taught the content, he or she should demonstrate. I like to use the caricature descriptions from Module 3; I pick up at the end of the description and start some dialogue for demonstration purposes.
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Students should practice this skill several times, creating characters and then having those characters engage in dialogue. They CAN do this in pairs - each student creating the "lines" for one character to focus on realistic vernacular and colloquialisms.
Below are some student examples of dialogue:
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