Writing direct speech is a really useful thing to be able to do in your writing, particularly if you're writing a story. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, it is a good way to give character to your characters. You can give them their own way of speaking, you can give them you know words that are more or less you know formal or informal or play, forms, so forth. So it's just a tricky one up your slave. The second thing is that quite aside from what it does for your characters, having speech in it transforms the story, I would say that almost every story is better with a bit of direct speech you know. So let's look at how we do it. So here we have great said spot one of my favourite sentences. Now there are a number of problems with this. First of all it doesn't have its inverted commas. So what the person actually said has inverted commas around it. Of course this is a sentence so it gets a full stop at the end. Now some people would be tempted to put a full stop here because in actual fact the speech needs to be punctuated, it's a sentence to or an utterance so it needs some kind of punctuation at the end. The inverted comma there is not enough punctuation to end that sentence. In this case it's a full stop but for reasons I'll explain a little bit that actually turns into a comma. The basic rule is if your full stop is followed by a speech verb like spot-seared or said spot, then your full stop turns into a comma. So that's the first lesson. We have inverted commas around, we have terminal punctuation and we also start with a capital letter. Some people have all of their speech lower case but the normal rules apply if it's the start of a sentence you need a capital letter at the start of it. So let's have a look at the next bit. So this time we've actually got the speech verb first, Sally said. And what Sally said is it's time to go. So we need inverted commas around that. We need to end that sentence with a full stop. We could also use an exclamation mark if we want it. Or for that matter it could be a question but either way it means something. So it's time to go. That's a sentence so it starts with a capital. Sally gets a capital because she's the start of that sentence and also it's a name. And the one thing that lots of people miss is that when you start with Sally said or something like that the speech verb you need a comma before you start the actual speech. So Sally said comma it's time to go. So that's correctly punctuated. Sorry about that. So let's have a look at this. Great said spot. Sally said it's time to go spot. Now there's actually something I've missed here because she's speaking to spot you actually need a comma there just like okay mum it's time to go comma spot. When you use somebody's name you need to put a comma before it or if you said spot it's time to go it will be spot comma it's time to go. Now what I've done here is I've broken them out onto their own lines. So when I change speaker I've got a bit of space so that the person can recognise that it's not just a jumble of text I'm changing speaker. Now this is actually a punctuation rule but it's really useful for your writing. If you're looking most published books they will break out their speech by who's actually speaking so that's a really good thing to keep up your sleeve. Next up just to recap quotation marks go around the exact words that the person said. When the speech verb goes first you put a comma before it so Sally said comma terrific. When the speech verb goes afterwards a full stop get transformed into a comma so great comma said spot. Even though it would normally be a full stop because it's followed by the speech verb it turns into a comma. This does not happen if it's a question mark if it's an exclamation mark or if it's an ellipsis. If this sentence was great said spot with a question mark it would stay question. If it was an exclamation it would stay an exclamation and ellipsis would stay. It's just that a full stop gets transformed. So anyhow there is a very very speedy lesson about writing speech I hope it's helpful.