"Quotations"

As we read novels, we encounter a lot of dialogue.  Therefore, it's important for students to understand what is dialogue, how it's used, its purpose and how to incorporate it so they can apply it into their own writing.

Today we took a part of a novel and began to analyze the quotation marks.  First, we identified quotation marks and noted that they are used to indicate what a characters says out loud.  Then we noticed that different punctuation is used at the end of dialogue, which is dependent on (a) where the dialogue is located in a sentence, and (b) if the dialogue is an exclamation or a question.  Dialogue sure can be tricky!  We're also working to enhance our understanding of knowing who is speaking the dialogue, when sometimes it doesn't explicitly tell us.