When characters speak in a story, they are sharing their thoughts out loud. To understand written conversation, we must first separate the exact words a character says from the part of the sentence that tells us who is talking. The exact words spoken are called the dialogue. The other part of the sentence, which introduces or follows the spoken words, is known as the reporting clause.

Before worrying about adding commas or quotation marks, we must practice isolating the spoken words. A great trick is to look at a sentence and identify only the words that actually come out of the character's mouth. In the examples above, only the spoken words would be printed inside a character's speech bubble.