Okay, so here we go with another grammar peeve. I hope I'm not coming across as some kind of grammar Nazi, but these things bug me so much! I just gotta get it out of my system.

This is especially for all of you aspiring authors out there. I'm trying to do two things: save your editor a lot of headache, and save you all the extra money you won't have to pay your editor to fix all your writing!

GRAMMAR PEEVE #2: NOT PUNCTUATING DIALOGUE PROPERLY.

In my time so far as an indie author and editor, I have seen countless manuscripts in which the dialogue is not punctuated properly. Dialogue, or the words a character speaks, are enclosed in quotation marks (except in Great Britain and certain other places, where they are enclosed in inverted commas or what we Yanks call apostrophes). That much we all seem to get.

Let me set up a sample sentence, unpunctuated.

"It's time to go" Jack said

Now here's where the problem seems to lie for many writers. What punctuation mark is used after the word "go"?

ONLY A COMMA IS USED HERE. NOTHING ELSE*.

"It's time to go," Jack said.

*As with everything, of course, there are exceptions. These exceptions are the question mark, the exclamation mark, and the ellipsis. These can also be used depending on the effect you want.

"Is it time to go?" Jack asked.
"For cryin' out loud, it's time to go!" Jack said.
"It's time to go..." Jack said (denotes uncertainty).

But it should NEVER be: "It's time to go." Jack said.

DO YOU DO THIS? You'd be shocked at how many writers do.

Okay, now let's look at a sentence that is interrupted by the dialogue tag instead of having it at the end. Here's an example sentence, again without punctuation.

"It is time" Jack said "to go to work"

You see how the dialogue tag interrupts the sentence? This is perfectly fine, but you must use the correct punctuation. Again, that dialog tag should be preceded only by a comma, never a period.

"It is time," Jack said, "to go to work."

Notice that the second half is NEVER CAPITALIZED. That is, the word "to" is in smalls, not a leading capital. This rule only holds when it's one sentence, however. When the dialogue tag is between two sentences, you must capitalize the new sentence. Example:

"It's time to go," Jack said. "There's nothing more to do here."

Usually when you start a new topic, that's a new sentence. If you wrote the sentence: "It's time to go, there's nothing more to do here" that would be technically incorrect. You should use a period or a semicolon to separate the sentences.

"It's time to go. There's nothing more to do here." OR
"It's time to go; there's nothing more to do here."

But don't connect sentences with commas, that's a big NO-NO!

How do you know if it's a separate sentence? Speak the phrase aloud. If it makes sense all by itself, it's a sentence. Here are a couple more examples for you.

"I think," Joe said, "he is going to be sick."
"I wonder," Debbie said, "what is on the other side of that hill." (notice no question mark here - it's not a question!)
"That's not the right way," Mark said. "We should have turned left back there."

Okay, that's it for Grammar Peeves for this week; I hope it helps (notice the semicolon)!

Any questions, be sure to ask and I'll do my best to answer them for you. :)