Teaching Writing Dialogue

Teaching Writing Dialogue

Teaching Writing Dialogue : Multi-thousand tips to make your life easier.

Writing dialogue is challenging. Good dialogue must sound natural and realistic and should support the plot. But teaching dialogue writing is much more challenging, as it involves the responsibility of producing writers who can write believable and effective dialogue. If you are teaching dialogue writing for the first time, here are some pointers.

• Ask students to study samples of good dialogue. Tell your students to read classic and contemporary literature and ask them to analyze the dialogues. Instruct them to determine what makes these dialogues effective. As an exercise, ask students to reconstruct the dialogues in their own words. For example, have them create a conversation between Anna and her lover Vronsky (from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) in a modern setting.
• Instruct your students to develop their characters. The characters’ personalities and backgrounds determine how they speak. A lady lawyer speaks differently from a lady preschool teacher, just as a spinster aunt speaks differently from a cheerleader. If students have a solid idea of who their characters are, they will know their characters’ choice of words and manner of speaking. Ask students to make a character profile for each character by defining gender, social background, education, profession, personality, mannerisms, and attitude. Every time they write dialogue, students should consult the character profiles.
• Tell them to listen to real-life dialogue. Because characters are fictional versions of real people, dialogue must also be a fictional version of real-life dialogue. This is why students should always note how real people converse and express themselves. Tell them to take note of real people’s speaking habits, lines, and sentence construction, and remind them to incorporate their observations into their dialogue.
• Emphasize the need for distinct voices. When writing, students must be able to show differences among characters by giving them different voices. The old lady character should sound like a real old lady, while the youngster should sound really young. Readers should easily recognize the distinctions even without “he/she said” tags.
• Let them read their dialogue aloud. Reading aloud is one way to know if the dialogue is truly effective and realistic. Ask students to pick one or two classmates, depending on the number of characters in the scene, to voice particular characters. If the dialogue flows like a real conversation, without sounding fake or structured, it is effective. If you sense awkwardness in the students as they read the dialogue, as if they are uncomfortable speaking their lines, the dialogue needs improvement.
• Prepare plenty of exercises. Writing skills are enhanced through constant practice and plenty of exercises. This applies to writing dialogue as well. To further enhance their talent for dialogue writing, give your students several exercises, such as writing a conversation between two completely opposite individuals, between two dignified ladies competing for one job, and among a group of people talking about a very sensitive issue. Assess the dialogues and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Encourage your students to go out and observe people. Let them eavesdrop so they can better grasp how different people speak in different ways. The secret to making realistic and believable dialogue is not only imagination; exposure to the real world is also necessary.