Editing Personal Narratives
After making big changes to improve your personal narrative, you need to make little changes (editing) to correct any remaining errors. You'll look for problems with sentences, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, usage, and spelling. The following activities will help you edit your narrative.
Editing Dialogue for Quotation Marks
Dialogue uses quotation marks. These special marks go before and after the exact words of the speaker.
“Yum,” I said.
Manny’s dad said, “Welcome to the fiesta.”
Periods and commas that follow the speaker’s words always go inside the quotation marks.
“It’s time to change into our costumes,” said Manny. “Follow me.”
Question marks and exclamation marks go inside the quotation marks when they punctuation the dialogue.
“Are you ready for this?” asked Manny.
“Wow!” I said.
Watch the video "Punctuating Dialogue."
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Insert quotation marks.
Insert quotation marks before and after the speaker’s words. Use the examples on this page for help. (Make a copy of this Google doc or download a Word template.) The first one has been done for you.