Pet Peeve #10 - “Dialogue tags?” she asked. - Part Two
Dialogue punctuation. This is something that not so much annoys me but also tends to stick out more in your writing than a great, big red check mark across the page.
I think some writers get confused by the quotation marks. No worries. Just forget them. Use punctuation and capitalization like you usually would!
If the dialogue ends a sentence and a new sentence begins after, you punctuate the same, quotation marks or not.
With dialogue:
“I told you why!” Billie began twisting the ring on her finger. “I told you twice.”
Without dialogue:
She had told him why. She had told him twice, in fact.
If the dialogue doesn’t end the sentence - if you’re using dialogue tags - then you punctuate with a comma. This is the tricky one though, because even if you use an exclamation mark, question mark, or hyphen, you lowercase what is outside the quotation marks. (Unless it’s a proper name, but you know that.)
“What do you mean, twice?” he asked.
“I meant what I said!” she said, now pouting.
“But I-” he began.
“Twice,” she said. “Twice, twice, twice. How hard is that to understand?”
Of course, you should not be using so many dialogue tags, but now you understand why I’m saying. Don’t let the quotation marks screw you up too much. They are your friends. 
For further reading on dialogue tags, try this.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Ah, finally! The long awaited dialogue punctuation post. Good post.
February 15th, 2007 at 5:22 am
Thank you very much. Glad you enjoyed.