A dialogue within a literary work is when two or more characters have a conversation between one another. This can be in a spoken or written form. When used properly dialogue can help advance a story and share a character's thoughts, personality, and feelings. It also helps to make the character seem more human to the audience. This is often the liveliest portion of any literary work. When we see the characters begin to interact, we quickly get to learn the nature of their relationships and the dynamics that may exist between them. Characters can also have an inner dialogue where they speak to themselves to help reveal their personality a bit more. When conversations happen between two characters, we call this outer dialogue.

Quotation marks (" ") are the form of punctuation that is used to declare a clear dialogue is taking place. They are placed at the begin and end of the words being spoken. You will not want those tags are words that may identify the speaker. When you identify the speaker, you will want to use a comma to connect it to the dialogue. Over the course of a dialogue, you will want to start a new paragraph each time you transition between speakers in the conversation. These worksheets will show you how to interpret dialogue. This is a different form of reading comprehension because it requires you to infer thoughts from the text that you are analyzing. You will need to be able to spot the motives of the characters even though you have no body language to work with. We will also work on the tricky nature of using punctuation properly in this form of text. After we have the basics down, we will have students learn to write in this format to help craft stories of their own. We practice this skill several times giving your various scenarios. We will also analyze the written work of others and learn some helpful proofreading and editing skills. We expand that to learning how to infer more about a settings and characters from this form of literature.