Punctuating direct speech
English · Key Stage 2 · The School
What goes inside the marks
Inverted commas go around the words actually spoken, and nothing else. The punctuation that ends the speech goes INSIDE them too: "I'm going home," she said. Note the comma rather than a full stop, because the sentence is not finished — `she said` is still to come. If the speech ends in a question or exclamation, that mark goes inside instead.
A new speaker, a new line
Every time the speaker changes, start a new line and indent it. This is not decoration: it is how a reader keeps track of who is talking without being told every time. Once you do it reliably you can drop many of the `he said` tags altogether, because the line break already says a different person is speaking.
Said is fine, mostly
`Said` is nearly invisible to a reader, which is usually what you want. Replace it only when the replacement adds information a reader could not already get: `whispered`, `admitted`, `interrupted` all tell you something. `exclaimed loudly` tells you nothing the exclamation mark has not. Reaching for a thesaurus on every line makes writing harder to read, not better.
Start with: where are you going asked Ali. (1) Open speech marks before the first spoken word: "Where. (2) Capital letter, because speech starts a sentence. (3) The spoken part ends with a question mark, INSIDE the marks: "Where are you going?" (4) Then the speech verb, lower case: asked Ali. (5) Full stop at the end. Result: "Where are you going?" asked Ali. New speaker means a new line, every time.