The Short, Sweet Guide To Dialogue

Dialogue is central to most genres of writing, especially creative writing. Novels are deeply rooted in dialogue, as is creative nonfiction. The heart of journalism is the quote. Stage plays and screenplays are almost entirely dialogue.
Dialogue is also the way in which we reveal and conceal ourselves.
Word choice and accent tell us a great deal about the person talking-but in a less obvious way, the rhythms and hesitations also reveal a lot. They're like the body language of speech. And what a person doesn't say may tell as much about them as what they do say. Dialogue is astonishingly intimate and immediate.
All the more surprising, then, that dialogue is rarely taught in basic writing classes-neither the skill of writing interesting, powerful,
revealing dialogue, nor the equally important skill of knowing how to paragraph and punctuate it.
That's where this book comes in.