To care about characters, readers need to know them. It's your job as the story's author to describe characters in a way that makes them seem real--more like people that most readers can understand and relate to. This lesson suggested several ways to do that. Click the tabs below to remind yourself of those ways.
Characterization
Dialogue
Characterization is the name for all the techniques you use to describe your story's characters or to demonstrate their qualities. As this lesson has shown you, there are many ways to reveal a character's personality to readers. You should use as many of these techniques as possible in a story you're writing. As you revise the first draft of a narrative, look for sections where you can add each type of characterization. Use the chart below as a quick guide, but look back through this lesson if you need to see examples of each type.
| what the author says directly about a character |
| what a character does |
| what a characters says |
| what characters say about each other |
Hearing your characters speak is one of the best ways for readers to know and understand them. But characterization isn't the only effect of dialogue. You use conversations between characters to move the plot along by having characters discuss what is happening. You can also use dialogue to reveal details about setting or background information that readers need to know.
Regardless of how you use dialogue, though, you need to follow some conventions, or well-known guidelines, for formatting dialogue. Otherwise, your readers may not know that a dialogue is happening. Or they may not know who is saying what. Use the examples below to remind yourself how to organize and punctuate the dialogues in a story.
| Character's Complete Dialogue Sentence | Dialogue Tag | Comments |
| "I thought you were going to the movies tonight," Zadi said | Zadi said | Notice that a comma is used to separate the dialogue from the tag. |
| "I changed my mind," Keri replied. "Is that a problem?" | Keri replied | Here the tag is placed within the line of dialogue, separating the speaker's two complete thoughts. The first part of the speaker's line is separated from the tag with a comma. |
| Zadi looked surprised. "Not at all, but I thought you were looking forward to it." | Zadi looked surprised. | The introductory sentence is not connected to the dialogue, but it still lets us know who is talking. |
| "I was." Keri dug her fork into her piece of pie. "Things changed." | Keri dug her fork into her piece of pie. | Here the dialogue tag appears between two lines of dialogue and is not connected to either, but the action tells us who is talking--and how. |
