TRANSACTIONAL WRITING: Dialogues

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Dialogue is a form of writing used for conversations between two or more people, for interviews or for script writing.

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The Dialogue in William Shakespeare's Macbeth
Dialogue is the conversations and words spoken aloud by characters in a novel, a film, or a play. A Dialogue in a play is not just words put together to form a sentence, but they are words that promote feelings to the audience whether it be direct or indirect. William Shakespeare is famous for the way he wrote his plays, he wrote his plays in iambic pentameter, which is having five pairs of syllables on a line of dialogue that does not rhyme. He also wrote lines of dialogue that rhymed but were not in iambic pentameter.

Written Dialogues

Each sentence is usually a response to the previous sentence.
Dialogues are written in direct speech, but there are no inverted commas.

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The speaker's name, followed by a colon, is the written on the left-hand side of the page.
Extra information, such as an instruction on how to say or to do something, is written in parenthesis (brackets).
The tone and language will depend on the relationship between the two speakers/characters and the topic of conversation.

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A line should be left between each speaker to ensure clarity.

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Shakespeare Dialogue
Every line of Shakespeare dialogue is packed with clues.
On first sight, Shakespeare dialogue may seem daunting. Indeed, the idea of performing a Shakespeare speech fills many young actors with fear.

However, you should remember that Shakespeare was an actor himself and wrote for fellow performers. Forget criticism and textual analysis because everything an actor needs is right there in the dialogue – you just need to know what you’re looking for.