Fandom Grammar

This week, Facebook serves up some punctuational goodness, care of George Takei's feed:

( I've done far worse than kill you. I've split infinitives. )

This Valentine's Day, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has some advice for the best use of grammar in a relationship:


(click for source)

A discussion of culturally relevant words at Dinosaur Comics devolves into something else entirely. Click the preview for the full comic:

At long last, Dinosaur Comics has solved the dilemma of the gender-neutral pronoun. Click the preview for the full comic:

Welcome to a brand-spanking new type of content at fandom_grammar. For the next three months, Friday content will consist of Blast From the Past articles, which will link to and expand on existing articles on questions we get asked again and again.

Have a topic you want to see brought up from the archives? Comment here.

This week's topic is punctuation, specifically how it interacts with dialogue:

First, we have links to our Grammar 101 articles about basic punctuation:

Grammar 101: Punctuation, Part 1 (periods, question marks, exclamation points, semicolons, and colons)
written by skroberts

Grammar 101: Punctuation, Part 3 (hyphens, en dashes, slashes, quotation marks, and apostrophes)
written by green_grrl

A common problem is where the commas go in dialogue tags (the he said, she said part of the sentence). This article lays out the rules:

Answer: Comma Use in Dialogue Tags
written by melayneseahawk

If you're looking for more advanced punctuation, take a look at these two:

Answer: How do you punctuate high emotion?
written by melayneseahawk

Answer: What is the correct punctuation for speech that "trails off"?
written by theemdash

If you have any other questions about punctuation and dialogue, don't hesitate to take them to our Ask a Question post.

campylobacter asked:

Can one interrupt dialogue with first person narration? (with examples from Firefly, Stargate SG-1, and The X-Files)

The short answer is yes.

( The long answer is under the cut. )