Understand How to Punctuate Split Speech

Can you spot the missing punctuation in the direct speech below?

 

Jack exclaimed “What a beautiful day”

 

The writer has used a reporting clause (Jack exclaimed) at the beginning of the sentence. A reporting clause tells us who said it and how they said it.

 

However, we must always put a comma after a reporting clause - can you see that the speech above is missing that comma?

 

Also, we must always put a piece of punctuation before closing the inverted commas (speech marks). We can put a comma, exclamation mark or a question mark if the reporting clause is at the end of the sentence or we can use a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark if the reporting clause is at the start of the sentence.

 

Here, Jack is exclaiming, so we should put an exclamation mark.

 

Jack exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”

 

 

Now, that looks a lot better!

Sometimes, when writing a story, we use something called split (or interrupted) speech.

 

There are two ways split speech can be used and we’ll be looking at the first way in this activity.

 

Split speech to split one spoken sentence in half

Look at the sentence below:

 

“I wonder what it would be like to be famous,” Amira thought.

 

 

We can split the spoken part of the sentence into two parts and put the reporting clause in the middle, like this:

 

“I wonder,” Amira thought, “what it would be like to be famous.”

 

Can you spot the differences in the punctuation?

 

1. We must put a comma after the first broken part of the sentence.

2. We must put a comma after the reporting clause.

3. We don’t need to use a capital letter for the second section of the speech as it’s just a continuation of the first part.

4. We then put a full stop at the end of the speech as it’s at the end of a sentence. We would put an exclamation mark or question mark if needed.

 

Can you think of a way to turn this speech into split speech?

 

“I’ve had enough of your lies!” shouted Briana.

 

 

How about this:

 

“I’ve had enough,” shouted Briana, “of your lies!”

 

Did you have something similar?

 

In this activity, you’ll be using the correct punctuation for split (or interrupted) speech. Good luck.