Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….in this episode, I am ready to teach you with quotation examples for dialogue! Dialogue writing is tough for students, so the more quotation examples we can give them, the better! And that is why I go to great (and expensive due to all of the edits needed!) lengths to be sure that I have samples of everything I expect my students to do—including many quotation examples and dialogue examples.
This week’s HIT takes dialogue writing to a whole new level as I teach you (the parent, teacher, or teaching parent) how to punctuate these challenging dialogue pieces—and then teach you how to teach it to your students. (I have learned that simply reciting rules or memorizing rules for punctuation and writing techniques is seldom adequate for learning.)
(You will get a dialogue writing lesson this week—so you can use the Teacher’s Notebook over and over again to teach dialogue for high schoolers anytime!)
So if you need help with any of these things, this lesson will be of use to you:
- How to know when and how to change paragraphs in dialogue (that was introduced in HIT 25)
- How to know when you must have a speech tag and when the speaker is still obvious to the reader without a speech tag
- Where to place speech tags for emphasis and clarity
- How to use an excerpt with proper dialogue to teach from
- How to write/teach split quotes in which there is one complete sentence but you want to put the speech tag in the middle of that sentence
- How to write a speech tag that is a complete sentence by itself and can have a colon following it
- So much more!!!
Oh, and we use an excerpt from a Cinderella model story to learn! Fun, fun!
Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one also has the invaluable sample paragraphs (of dialogue)—don’t teach without them!
It’s all here in this week’s HIT—where each week, I bring you tips, tricks, and techniques for teaching writing, language arts, grammar, and more (to grades two through twelve) drawing upon my 100+ curriculum books totaling over 50,000 pages.
And for your convenience, How I Teach…. is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a YouTube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)!
Note: This lesson came from Write for a Month Twice-Told Tales IV, a month-long downloadable book!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
