Teaching Dialogue

When teaching dialogue, I like to use Noticings. I give students excerpts with dialogue and ask them what they notice about the quotation marks, punctuation, and capitalization. They they help to create the rules for writing dialogue.

The Plato Author's Techniques lesson continues with a brief discussion of dialogue. For my adaptation, students used noticings to develop the rules for writing dialogue. We then used printable comics at Make Beliefs Comix to practice writing dialogue that fits a certain mood in the text. While comics aren't typically punctuated like dialogue, we practiced using the dialogue rules in our comics.

Students were encouraged to create their own comics on the Make Beliefs Comix website using the same rules and their own moods after completion of the class lesson.

Students created dialogue with printable comic strips.