Wordplay©
Grammar clinic

Direct speech is used to quote what someone has said. You show it using punctuation - inverted commas, or quotation marks “ ”.

“You remind me of my neighbour,” she said.

She said, “You remind me of my neighbour.”

“You,” she said, “remind me of my neighbour.”

The rules are:

• the quotation – what has been said – is enclosed in inverted commas
• the narrative part of the sentence is always separated from the spoken part of the sentence with a comma
• when the speech is interrupted and then resumed (example three) you don’t need a capital letter to restart the quotation
• when the quotation comes at the end of the narrative, the full stop, question mark or exclamation mark comes before the inverted comma