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How Do You Put Dialogue In Your Essay?

Posted: May 28, 2025 | 4 min read

Making your writing truly engaging is an art. A dialogue is one of the tools that make writing vivid and powerful. If you want to enrich your text with quality conversations and reveal your characters’ personalities, you’re in the right place. This guide with steps, tips, and dialogue writing examples for students will help you write winning dialogues. Our speech writing service is here to assist you with dialogues that keep your reader engaged till the last word.

What is a dialogue and what is its role?

First things first: dialogue is a written conversation in a novel, script, or 500-word essay. Dialogue can take one, two, three, or more characters to occur. When a character has a conversation inside their head, it’s called an inner dialogue. When two or more characters speak, it’s called a dialogue.

You may add dialogue in an essay for multiple purposes.

To specify your character and tell more about their mindset, feelings, emotions, and situations.
To provide background and give more context about the situation when the dialogue is happening.
To make your writing more immersive and help your reader “hear” your characters’ voice apart from yours only.
Dialogue isn’t typical for research paper topics, but in narrative essays, it can illustrate experience.

5 steps to write a dialogue that engages your audience

Know the reason for a dialogue

Before writing a dialogue, you should clearly know why it happens at this or that specific piece of text. Do you want to reveal certain information to your reader or show the relationships between your characters? Or maybe you want to advance the action of your plot? While a guide to writing argumentative essays may not focus on dialogues, it can also help show conflicts. Dialogue serves various purposes, and you should include it to strengthen your writing.

Define the participants of a dialogue

Knowing who’s going to have the conversation is important. If you understand the purpose of dialogue in an essay, it is easier to decide which characters need to speak. Think about what they are saying and why they are doing it. Also, think about how their personality would influence the way they speak. Tip: do not engage too many characters in a dialogue not to confuse the reader.

Keep a dialogue concise

With dialogues, less is more. Avoid making your written conversations wordy and cut back everything that adds nothing to your story. In a dialogue, you are not imitating real-life conversations but trying to move your story forward. Dialogue should characterize, highlight, and provide information or background.

Include action beats

Action beats are an effective way to make your dialogues vivid by adding emotions or movements. Action beats help readers better understand the setting, your characters, and their feelings. As John Steinbeck said, “If you are using dialogue — say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”

You can add action beats at the beginning, in middle, or at the end of dialogues.

Example (at the end): “The doctor said there’s no need to worry,” Jenny said with a smile and relief.

Example (at the beginning and at the end): Michael nervously sipped his beer. “This is the place where I saw Susan last time,” he said, looking away.

Keep in mind the setting

When you’re writing a dialogue, keep in focus both the characters and the setting, historical or imagined. Emotions and conversations help your reader “feel” your characters. But adding the information about the setting makes your essay more balanced and connected to things that happen around. For instance, if you need help with history essays, understanding how to use dialogue in creative assignments is crucial. It will help your readers feel like they are part of this historical setting too.

How to keep a proper dialogue writing format

Formatting a dialogue in a proper way is important to set this part of an essay apart. Follow these general rules in your essay.

Use quotation marks to show the beginning and the end of the dialogue.
Begin a new paragraph for each speaker. Even if the speaker says one word. Also, indent each new paragraph.
Keep all punctuation related to the character’s speech inside the quotation marks.
If your character quotes someone else, place single quotation marks inside the speech. For instance, “I told my mom, ‘Don’t read my messages.’ But she did it anyway when Brian texted me!”
Use an em dash (—) when your character’s speech is being interrupted. For example: “Did you see —” “No, it can’t be John!”
Use different dialogue tags. These are words like “said”, “shouted”, “replied”, “asked”, “whispered” etc.

Aside from general rules, there are also specific rules on how to write and format dialogue. Depending on whether it is an APA or MLA essay, formatting requirements will differ. Professional essay editors help your dialogue follow the formatting rules to enhance the flow of your essay.

APA dialogue formatting

Short quotes (under 40 words). If a character has a short line, both the dialogue tag and the quote go in the same paragraph. Use commas to separate dialogue tags.

Example: She said, “I can’t stay in this house anymore. Let’s go for a walk!”

Long quotes (above 40 words). For longer lines, use inverted commas at the beginning and at the end of each paragraph.
If the dialogue involves more than two speakers, each speaker has their own paragraph.

MLA dialogue writing rules

Start a new paragraph for a quote, even if the line is very short. Use commas to separate the dialogue tag and the quote.

Example:

Tom said,

“Oh, no! I forgot my laptop at your place!”

If the speech of a character is longer than one paragraph, place quotation marks at the start of every paragraph. Close the quotation marks only at the very end of the speech.

Master your dialogues with us

All in all, a good dialogue advances the plot, reveals personalities, and provides necessary information. Likewise, a good dialogue is one that is properly formatted. If you’re stuck with rules of dialog in the essay, contact us. Our skilled writers will create a perfect storyline, format your dialogues flawlessly, and make your essay shine. Order an essay writing service and see how our experts handle it with ease!