Dialogue is an important aspect of any story. Dialogue is a way for writers to reveal traits of their characters and makes a story more interesting. It's how we see how people interact and how they speak to others. Of course, there are stories that don't have any dialogue whatsoever, but that's different.

There are few mistakes I see people make when writing dialogue, and it really gets on my nerves.

Depending on where you live, you may have been taught differently. I was taught to use "" when a character speaks, but I noticed that in some books, such as the Harry Potter books, the author uses ' ' to indicate a character speaking.

In any case, when writing dialogue, ALWAYS HAVE QUOTATION MARKS!

Whenever someone speaks, you start a new line; this is LOGIC! You don't just have them speak in the middle of a paragraph. There are some cases where you can have a sentence or two before the character speaks, but not too many or it just looks bad. I will talk more about this soon.

This is probably one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to dialogue in stories.

Like I said, when someone speaks, you start a new line. So when you have dialogue between characters, you start a new line each time a different person speaks. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this:

"Hey babe. Where are you going?" Niall asked Emma as she got off the couch. "To the washroom." "Well hurry up."

That ^^ bugs me so much!!

This is how you would write the scene above:

"Hey babe. Where are you going?" Niall asked Emma as she got off the couch.

"To the washroom."

"Well hurry up."

Depending on how you write your sentence, your punctuation and quote integration will vary.

"Hey," Emma said.

"Hey." Emma said.

Here is another thing you should know. If you want to include some writing and then put a quote in that same sentence, you use a comma. If you continue the sentence after the quote, you still use a comma (I hope I wrote that in a way that makes sense).

Harry sighed and turned to face Louis, saying, "I'm sorry, Louis. I didn't mean for this to happen."

Jessica turned her back to Jackson and mumbled, "Leave me alone," under her breath.

There are also sentences like this, where commas are extremely important (I know, I'm talking about commas a lot). These are what you could call a combo sentence (I can't think of a better term so if you think of one feel free to comment).

"Well," Louis said, "we could go to the fair?"

It's not two dots.

It's not four dots.

It's not eight dots or twenty dots.

Now we're going to move onto a different topic related to dialogue: personalizing dialogue.

You should try to have some sort of personality trait within every character's lines. If you're writing a character who speaks sort of like a "thug" or whatever you want to call them, it wouldn't make sense to always use proper grammer, right?

"Bruh, did yah hear 'bout Emma and Luke?" "Hey, did you here about Emma and Luke?"

There are some things you can do to try and add personality to your character's dialogue, not just through what they say, but how they say it.

This could include lots of laughing. When someone laughs, you could describe the laugh. Is it really loud and dorky? Is it quiet and more like a giggle? How does the character look when they laugh? Do their eyes water? Do they flail their limbs around or something? This is what I mean.

"And he got so scared he p-peed himself!" Niall wheezed.

Greg busted out laughing, eyes watering as he looked down at his younger brother with glee and put a hand to his chest. "S-Seriously? Oh my gosh, that's hilarious!"

When you're writing dialogue, if there is a specific emotion that is significant in the scene, it's important to incorporate the emotions in the dialogue. It also depends on what emotion the character is feeling and, as I said earlier, if the emotion is important in the scene. For example, if the character feeling sort of neutral (not sad, not happy, not upset or angry or anything), then the emotions aren't as important. Do you see what I mean?

I'm going to go over a few ways you can express emotions through dialogue and the context around the dialogue.

When a character is sad, you could either express it through their dialogue or, if they are hiding their feelings from other characters for whatever reason, through the context. You need to explain how they feel, and if they're crying, express that too.

Some ways you can express sadness through dialogue alone are using pauses (elipses are great for this) and stuttering, though be careful with how much the character stutters if you decide to use that.

"Sweetie," the mother breathed as she looked down at her son. She let out a deep sigh when seeing the confusion and fear in Liam's eyes. Her own eyes shimmered with grief and mourning as she said, "I'm so sorry, swettie, but...y-your father...he's dead."

The room went completely silent and Liam stood there, staring up at his mother in shock. He could feel his heart breaking in his chest, leaving a gaping hole. He tried to speak, but the lump building in his throat made it difficult to do so. Swallowing it, he shook his head and said as his eyes brimmed with tears, "No...y-you're lying! He's not dead! He's not dead! He c-can't be..."

There are two other ways you can write pauses in dialogue, but I'm not going into them. I feel like you guys could probably figure them out yourselves.

I guess this could be similar to when a character is sad. Stuttering and pauses could be used when expressing anger.

When a character is angry, you want to build it up. Don't have your character start yelling right away when they're angry. Building up to the anger makes the scene more interesting and is more realistic, in my opinion. I was also taught about this in my old acting class.

When your character first becomes angry, do they try to hide it? No? Either way, keep it calm but intense at first.

"What happened here?" Donna asked as she ran into the living room, having heard the loud crash from the kitchen. The first thing she saw was her two sons laying on the ground and her mother's lamp laying next to them in a pile of broken pieces. Her eyes widened and she looked down at the two boys, saying slowly, "How many times have I told you...no fooling around in the living room?" Her voice shook slightly with her anger, but she did her best to contain it.

See! The mother is angry at her two kids, but she doesn't just start yelling at them. Reactions obviously depends on your character's personality, but this is just an example.

Let's continue with this scene.

"We're sorry, mom," Lucas said quietly, a guilty look on his face. His brother Ashton nodded along, also looking guilty.

The mother sucked in a deep breath and let it out shakily. "I told you two a million times that you are not allowed to fool around in the house. Now look what you've done. You broke your grandmother's favourite lamp!" She scolded.

"We'll pay for a new one," Ashton offered.

The mother shook her head in annoyance. "No, you boys don't understand. That was your grandmother's lamp! She loved that thing, and it has been in the family for decades!" She snapped, her voice raising in volume. Both boys stared at her with wide eyes.

"We didn't know," Lucas said, trying to defend him and his brother.

"It doesn't matter!" the mother exclaimed. Her hands shook with the anger slowly building up in the pit of her stomach. "You broke the lamp and it looks like it can't be fixed. You two are grounded! Go to your rooms now."

"But, mom-" Ashton tried to plead, but was cut off by his mother.

"NOW!" she finally shouted, losing her patience. Her eyes flared with anger as she pointed to the stares. Both of her sons shivered under her icy glare and quickly scrambled to their feet, dashing out of the living room and up the stairs to their room.

Okay that wasn't the greatest example, but you get the point...I hope.

For this, the same stuff applies. You can still use elipses and stuttering, and you should still describe how the character feels. You can also include their body language in this. Maybe their hands are shaking. Maybe their mouth is suddenly really dry and it's difficult for them to speak. Maybe their palms are sweating, or they're just sweating in general. Is their heart beating faster? This is stuff you could try to use.

"Up next, we have Micheal Clifford singing 'Wonderwall'," the announcer said into the microphone.

There were loud cheers from the audience. Micheal stood at the side of the stage, knees and hands shaking with nerves. He had never sang in front of so many people before and he was extremely nervous. He tried to walk forward, but his feet felt like they were made of lead.

"Mate, go on," his friend Ashton said encouragingly. He patted Micheal's shoulder soothingly. "You'll do fine, yeah? Just take a few deep breaths and pretend that you're all alone."

Micheal nodded and took a deep, shaky breath, letting it out slowly afterwards. "Y-Yeah...you're right." He forced himself to walk onto the stage, the bright lights making him sweat even more than he already was. Everything suddenly felt like it was in slow motion, and all Micheal could here was the rapid pounding of his heart.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but using adjectives and stuff can also be useful in dialogue. You can use them to describe how a character is not only feeling, but how they're saying what they say.

I could go on about every emotion, but I think you guys get the idea now. Dialogue isn't the easiet thing to teach. Just use proper grammar and punctuation and you should be fine.