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Aside from the third item being correct, as others have noted, the punctuation around the dialogue tag reflects how it interacts with your two pieces of dialogue. An ellipsis indicates that the s...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:46Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32596 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T07:42:39Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32596 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Aside from the third item being correct, as others have noted, the punctuation around the dialogue tag reflects how it interacts with your two pieces of dialogue. An ellipsis indicates that the speaker is trailing off at the end, or gradually building up to speaking at the beginning. You _can_ have an ellipsis at the beginning of a piece of dialogue, but the text has to support it. > "So if you're not into men, and you're not into women, that makes you..." > > "...Aromantic, I guess?" he said with a shrug. In your snippet, _No promises made._ is a complete sentence. It has a crisp beginning. Chirag isn't trailing into it, so there's no need for a beginning ellipsis. And since the dialogue tag _Chirag said_ is completing the thought of the first sentence, it correctly ends with a period. If you want a trail-in and trail-out with the same person, it would run something like this: > “Don’t worry, I’ll try to make it quick..." Chirag smiled with too many teeth. "...but I'm not making any promises about _painless._" In this case, the dialogue tag is a complete sentence with a period. Your trail-in text is a continuation of your trail-out text, so it starts with an ellipsis and a lowercase letter.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-01-16T22:16:19Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 4