ABSTRACT
Common Core Language Standard 3.2 addresses the way students punctuate the dialogue in their writing. As part of a more general statement that students should “Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing,” this standard calls for students to “Use commas and quotation marks in dialogue” (Common Core, 2010). This element of Standard 3.2 means that students need to follow certain guidelines regarding comma and quotation use when punctuating the dialogue in their writing. These guidelines are important because they clearly separate a speaker’s words from the rest of the piece. To explore these guidelines in detail, let’s look at some examples of correctly punctuated dialogue and then examine what makes them correct. Authors use four typical sentence patterns when writing dialogue. The differences in these patterns have to do with the placement and presence of the “speaker tag,” which is the part of the sentence that identifies the speaker-for example, Ben said.
