In dialogue, begin a new paragraph to mark a change in speaker.
“Mom, his name is Willie, not William. A thousand times I’ve told you, it’s Willie.”
“Willie is a derivative of William, Lester. Surely his birth certificate doesn’t have Willie on it, and I like calling people by their proper names.”
“Yes, it does, ma’am. My mother named me Willie K. Mason.”
—Gloria Naylor
If a single speaker utters more than one paragraph, introduce each paragraph with quotation marks, but do not use closing quotation marks until the end of the speech.
Exercise: Quotation marks 1
Exercise: Quotation marks 2
Related topics:
Periods and commas with quotation marks
Introducing quotations