Dialogue is most often used in narratives that dramatize events. It reconstructs choice bits of conversation, rather than trying to present an accurate and complete record. In addition to showing people interacting, dialogue can give readers insight into character and relationships. Dialogue may be quoted to make it resemble the give-and-take of actual conversation, or it may be summarized to give readers the gist of what was said.
The following example from Gary Soto’s Living up the Street shows how a narrative can combine quoted and summarized dialogue. In this passage, Soto recalls his first experience as a migrant worker in California’s San Joaquin Valley:
“Are you tired?” she asked.
“No, but I got a sliver from the frame,” I told her. I showed her the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. She wrinkled her forehead but said it was nothing.
“How many trays did you do?”
I looked straight ahead, not answering at first. I recounted in my mind the whole morning of bend, cut, pour again and again, before answering a feeble “thirty-seven.” No elaboration, no detail. Without looking at me she told me how she had done field work in Texas and Michigan as a child. But I had a difficult time listening to her stories. I played with my grape knife, stabbing it into the ground, but stopped when Mother reminded me that I had better not lose it. I left the knife sticking up like a small, leafless plant. She then talked about school, the junior high I would be going to that fall, and then about Rick and Debra, how sorry they would be that they hadn’t come out to pick grapes because they’d have no new clothes for the school year. She stopped talking when she peeked at her watch, a bandless one she kept in her pocket. She got up with an “Ay, Dios,” and told me that we’d work until three, leaving me cutting figures in the sand with my knife and dreading the return to work.
––GARY SOTO, “One Last Time”
Soto uses signal phrases with the first two quotations but not with the third, where it is clear who is speaking. The fourth quotation, “thirty-seven,” is preceded by a narrative that tells what Soto did and thought before speaking and is followed by a summary of further conversation.
For more on deciding when to quote, see Chapter 2, 38–39, 50, and Chapter 26, pp. 701–6.
Quoted dialogue is easy to recognize, of course, because of the quotation marks. Summarized dialogue can be harder to identify. In this case, however, Soto embeds signal phrases (she told me and she then talked) in his narrative. Summarizing leaves out information the writer decides readers do not need. In this passage about a remembered event, Soto has chosen to focus on his own feelings and thoughts rather than his mother’s.
Read the essay “A Gringo in the Lettuce Fields” in Chapter 3, and consider Gabriel Thompson’s use of both direct quotation and summaries for reporting speech. When does Thompson choose to quote directly, and why might he have made this decision?
If you wrote a remembered-event essay in Chapter 2, pp. 81–84 or wrote a bit of narrative in some other essay, reread your essay, looking for one example of each of the following narrating strategies: calendar and clock time, temporal transitions, past-tense verbs in onetime events, narrative action, and dialogue. Do not worry if you cannot find examples of all of the strategies. Pick one strategy you did use, and comment on what it contributes to your narrative.