More so this reading period than in the past, I’ve been seeing more submissions in the After Happy Hour slush pile that make use of alternate approaches to formatting dialogue. This tracks with what I’ve read in other literary journals in recent months. It seems like ditching the quotation marks is on-trend right now—and there’s nothing wrong with doing that, in a general sense, but I’m not sure everyone who’s making this shift is doing so with a reason. I like it when it works, but a lot of the stories I’ve read, it feels like more of a distraction.

When a reader sees quotation marks they know exactly what this means, even if the writer hasn’t attached a dialogue tag to it: someone is speaking aloud. It’s an easy shorthand. Readers don’t have that same implicit understanding of other formatting approaches. You can teach the reader the conventions of your story quickly, but it’s still going to stand out for them as different from the norm. This means it takes a bit more mental effort to read the story—and, even if just at a subconscious level, the reader wants to feel like there’s a payoff for that extra effort, and a clear reason why the author made that formatting choice.

Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.

Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.