dialogue in research writing

A Guide to Writing Dialogue, With Examples

“Guess what?” Tanika asked her mother. 

“What?” her mother replied.

“I’m writing a short story,” Tanika said. 

“Make sure you practice writing dialogue!” her mother instructed. “Because dialogue is one of the most effective tools a writer has to bring characters to life.” Give your writing extra polish Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly

What is dialogue, and what is its purpose?

Dialogue is what the characters in your short story , poem , novel, play, screenplay, personal essay —any kind of creative writing where characters speak—say out loud. 

For a lot of writers, writing dialogue is the most fun part of writing. It’s your opportunity to let your characters’ motivations, flaws, knowledge, fears, and personality quirks come to life. By writing dialogue, you’re giving your characters their own voices, fleshing them out from concepts into three-dimensional characters. And it’s your opportunity to break grammatical rules and express things more creatively. Read these lines of dialogue: 

• “NoOoOoOoO!” Maddie yodeled as her older sister tried to pry her hands from the merry-go-round’s bars.
• “So I says, ‘You wanna play rough? C’mere, I’ll show you playin’ rough!’”
• “Get out!” she shouted, playfully swatting at his arm. “You’re kidding me, right? We couldn’t have won . . . ” 

Dialogue has multiple purposes. One of them is to characterize your characters. Read the examples above again, and think about who each of those characters are. You learn a lot about somebody’s mindset, background, comfort in their current situation, emotional state, and level of expertise from how they speak. 

Another purpose dialogue has is exposition, or background information. You can’t give readers all the exposition they need to understand a story’s plot up-front. One effective way to give readers information about the plot and context is to supplement narrative exposition with dialogue. For example, the protagonist might learn about an upcoming music contest by overhearing their coworkers’ conversation about it, or an intrepid adventurer might be told of her destiny during an important meeting with the town mystic. Later on in the story, your music-loving protagonist might express his fears of looking foolish onstage to his girlfriend, and your intrepid adventurer might have a heart-to-heart with the dragon she was sent to slay and find out the truth about her society’s cultural norms. 

Dialogue also makes your writing feel more immersive. It breaks up long prose passages and gives your reader something to “hear” other than your narrator’s voice. Often, writers use dialogue to also show how characters relate to each other, their setting, and the plot they’re moving through. 

It can communicate subtext, like showing class differences between characters through the vocabulary they use or hinting at a shared history between them. Sometimes, a narrator’s description just can’t deliver information the same way that a well-timed quip or a profound observation by a character can. 

In contrast to dialogue, a monologue is a single, usually lengthy passage spoken by one character. Monologues are often part of plays. 

The character may be speaking directly to the reader or viewer, or they could be speaking to one or more other characters. The defining characteristic of a monologue is that it’s one character’s moment in the spotlight to express their thoughts, ideas, and/or perspective. 

Often, a character’s private thoughts are delivered via monologue. If you’re familiar with the term internal monologue , it’s referring to this. An internal monologue is the voice an individual ( though not all individuals ) “hears” in their head as they talk themselves through their daily activities. Your story might include one or more characters’ inner monologues in addition to their dialogue. Just like “hearing” a character’s words through dialogue, hearing their thoughts through a monologue can make a character more relatable, increasing a reader’s emotional investment in their story arc. 

Types of dialogue

There are two broad types of dialogue writers employ in their work: inner and outer dialogue.  

Inner dialogue is the dialogue a character has inside their head. This inner dialogue can be a monologue. In most cases, inner dialogue is not marked by quotation marks . Some authors mark inner dialogue by italicizing it.

Outer dialogue is dialogue that happens externally, often between two or more characters. This is the dialogue that goes inside quotation marks. 

How to structure dialogue

Dialogue is a break from a story’s prose narrative. Formatting it properly makes this clear. When you’re writing dialogue, follow these formatting guidelines: 

• All punctuation in a piece of dialogue goes inside the quotation marks.
• Quoted dialogue within a line of dialogue goes inside single quotation marks (“I told my brother, ‘Don’t do my homework for me.’ But he did it anyway!”). In UK English, quoted dialogue within a line of dialogue goes inside double quotation marks.
• Every time a new character speaks, start a new paragraph. This is true even when a character says only one word. Indent every new paragraph. 
• When a character’s dialogue extends beyond a paragraph, use quotation marks at the beginning of the second and/or subsequent paragraph. However, there is no need for closing quotation marks at the end of the first paragraph—or any paragraph other than the final one. 
• Example: “Thank you for—”                                                                                                                        “Is that a giant spider?!”
• “Every night,” he began, “I heard a rustling in the trees.”
• “Every day,” he stated. “Every day, I get to work right on time.”

Things to avoid when writing dialogue

When you’re writing dialogue, avoid these common pitfalls: 

• Using a tag for every piece of dialogue: Dialogue tags are words like said and asked . Once you’ve established that two characters are having a conversation, you don’t need to tag every piece of dialogue. Doing so is redundant and breaks the reader’s flow. Once readers know each character’s voice, many lines of dialogue can stand alone. 
• Not using enough tags: On the flip side, some writers use too few dialogue tags, which can confuse readers. Readers should always know who’s speaking. When a character’s mannerisms and knowledge don’t make that abundantly obvious, tag the dialogue and use their name. 
• Dense, unrealistic speech: As we mentioned above, dialogue doesn’t need to be grammatically correct. In fact, when it’s too grammatically correct, it can make characters seem stiff and unrealistic. 
• Anachronisms: A pirate in 1700s Barbados wouldn’t greet his captain with “what’s up?” Depending on how dedicated you (and your readers) are to historical accuracy, this doesn’t need to be perfect. But it should be believable. 
• Eye dialect: This is an important one to keep in mind. Eye dialect is the practice of writing out characters’ mispronunciations phonetically, like writing “wuz” for “was.” Eye dialect can be (and has been) used to create offensive caricatures, and even when it’s not used in this manner, it can make dialogue difficult for readers to understand. Certain well-known instances of eye dialect, like “fella” for “fellow” and “‘em” for “them,” are generally deemed acceptable, but beyond these, it’s often best to avoid it. 

How to write dialogue

Write how people actually speak (with some editing).

You want your characters to sound like real people. Real people don’t always speak in complete sentences or use proper grammar. So when you’re writing dialogue, break grammatical rules as you need to. 

That said, your dialogue needs to still be readable. If the grammar is so bad that readers don’t understand what your characters are saying, they’ll probably just stop reading your story. Even if your characters speak in poor grammar, using punctuation marks correctly, even when they’re in the wrong places, will help readers understand the characters.

Here’s a quick example: 

“I. Do. Not. WANT. to go back to boarding school!” Caleb shouted. 

See how the period after each word forces your brain to stop and read each word as if it were its own sentence? The periods are doing what they’re supposed to do; they just aren’t being used to end sentences like periods typically do. Here’s another example of a character using bad grammar but the author using proper punctuation to make the dialogue understandable: 

“Because no,” she said into the phone. “I need a bigger shed to store all my stuff in . . . yeah, no, that’s not gonna work for me, I told you what I need and now you gotta make it happen.”

Less is more

When you’re editing your characters’ dialogue, cut back all the parts that add nothing to the story. Real-life conversations are full of small talk and filler. Next time you read a story, take note of how little small talk and filler is in the dialogue. There’s a reason why TV characters never say “good-bye” when they hang up the phone: the “good-bye” adds nothing to the storyline. Dialogue should characterize people and their relationships, and it should also advance the plot. 

Vary up your tags, but don’t go wild with them

“We love basketball!” he screamed.

“Why are you screaming?” the coach asked.

“Because I’m just so passionate about basketball!” he replied.

Dialogue tags show us a character’s tone. It’s good to have a variety of dialogue tags in your work, but there’s also nothing wrong with using a basic tag like “said” when it’s the most accurate way to describe how a character delivered a line. Generally, it’s best to keep your tags to words that describe actual speech, like:

You’ve probably come across more unconventional tags like “laughed” and “dropped.” If you use these at all, use them sparingly. They can be distracting to readers, and some particularly pedantic readers might be bothered because people don’t actually laugh or drop their words. 

Give each character a unique voice (and keep them consistent)

If there is more than one character with a speaking role in your work, give each a unique voice. You can do this by varying their vocabulary, their speech’s pace and rhythm, and the way they tend to react to dialogue.

Keep each character’s voice consistent throughout the story by continuing to write them in the style you established. When you go back and proofread your work, check to make sure each character’s voice remains consistent—or, if it changed because of a perspective-shifting event in the story, make sure that this change fits into the narrative and makes sense. One way to do this is to read your dialogue aloud and listen to it. If something sounds off, revise it. 

Dialogue examples

Inner dialogue.

As I stepped onto the bus, I had to ask myself: why was I going to the amusement park today, and not my graduation ceremony? 

He thought to himself, this must be what paradise looks like. 

Outer dialogue

“Mom, can I have a quarter so I can buy a gumball?”

Without skipping a beat, she responded, “I’ve dreamed of working here my whole life.”

“Ren, are you planning on stopping by the barbecue?” 

“No, I’m not,” Ren answered. “I’ll catch you next time.”

Here’s a tip: Grammarly’s  Citation Generator  ensures your essays have flawless citations and no plagiarism. Try it for citing dialogue in Chicago , MLA , and APA styles.

Dialogue FAQs

What is dialogue.

Dialogue is the text that represents the spoken word. 

How does dialogue work?

Dialogue expresses exactly what a character is saying. In contrast, a narrator might paraphrase or describe a character’s thoughts or speech. 

What are different kinds of dialogue?

Inner dialogue is the dialogue a character has inside their own head. Often, it’s referred to as an inner monologue. 

Outer dialogue is a conversation between two or more characters. 

Joining the Dialogue: Practices for Ethical Research Writing. Bettina Stumm. Broadview Press, 2021

Author biography, andreas herzog.

Dr. Andreas Herzog

Visiting Assistant Professor

Claflin University

English Department

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Stumm, B. Joining the dialogue: Practices for ethical research writing. Broadview Press, 2021.

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Joining the Dialogue: Practices for Ethical Research Writing

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With this in mind,  Joining the Dialogue  is geared to helping students discover the key ethical practices of dialogue—receptivity and response-ability—as they join a research conversation. It also helps students master the dialogic structure of research essays as they write in and for their academic communities. Combining an ethical approach with accessible prose, dialogic structures and templates, practical exercises, and ample illustrations from across the disciplines,  Joining the Dialogue  teaches students not only how to write research essays but also how to write those essays ethically as a dialogue with other researchers and readers.

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Joining the Dialogue: Practices for Ethical Research Writing. Bettina Stumm. Broadview Press, 2021

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Online publication: Feb. 16, 2022

A review of the journal Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

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Volume 32, 2022 , p. 59–62

© Andreas Herzog, 2022

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Writing is a social process. Texts are created to be read by others, and in creating those texts, writers should be aware of not only their personal assumptions, biases, and tastes, but also those of their readers. Writing, therefore, is an interactive process. It is a conversation, a meeting of minds, during which ideas are exchanged, debates and discussions take place and, sometimes, but not always, consensus is reached. You may be familiar with the famous quote by the 20th century rhetorician Kenneth Burke who compared writing to a conversation at a social event. In his 1974 book The Philosophy of Literary Form Burke writes,

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him, another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (110-111).

This passage by Burke is extremely popular among writers because it captures the interactive nature of writing so precisely. Reading Burke’s words carefully, we will notice that the interaction between readers and writers is continuous. A writer always enters a conversation in progress. In order to participate in the discussion, just like in real life, you need to know what your interlocutors have been talking about. So you listen (read). Once you feel you have got the drift of the conversation, you say (write) something. Your text is read by others who respond to your ideas, stories, and arguments with their own. This interaction never ends! To write well, it is important to listen carefully and understand the conversations that are going on around you. Writers who are able to listen to these conversations and pick up important topics, themes, and arguments are generally more effective at reaching and impressing their audiences. It is also important to treat research, writing, and every occasion for these activities as opportunities to participate in the on-going conversation of people interested in the same topics and questions which interest you. Our knowledge about our world is shaped by the best and most up-to-date theories available to them. Sometimes these theories can be experimentally tested and proven, and sometimes, when obtaining such proof is impossible, they are based on consensus reached as a result of conversation and debate. Even the theories and knowledge that can be experimentally tested (for example in sciences) do not become accepted knowledge until most members of the scientific community accept them. Other members of this community will help them test their theories and hypotheses, give them feedback on their writing, and keep them searching for the best answers to their questions. As Burke says in his famous passage, the interaction between the members of intellectual communities never ends. No piece of writing, no argument, no theory or discover is ever final. Instead, they all are subject to discussion, questioning, and improvement. A simple but useful example of this process is the evolution of humankind’s understanding of their planet Earth and its place in the Universe. As you know, in Medieval Europe, the prevailing theory was that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that all other planets and the Sun rotated around it. This theory was the result of the church’s teachings, and thinkers who disagreed with it were pronounced heretics and often burned. In 1543, astronomer Nikolaus Kopernikus argued that the Sun was at the center of the solar system and that all planets of the system rotate around the Sun. Later, Galieo experimentally proved Kopernikus’ theory with the help of a telescope. Of course, the Earch did not begin to rotate around the Sun with this discovery. Yet, Kopernikus’ and Galileo’s theories of the Universe went against the Catholic Church’s teachings which dominated the social discourse of Medieval Europe. The Inquisition did not engage in debate with the two scientists. Instead, Kopernikus was executed for his views and Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for his views. Although in the modern world, dissenting thinkers are unlikely to suffer such harsh punishment, the examples of Kopernikus and Galileo teach us two valuable lessons about the social nature of knowledge. Firstly, Both Kopernikus and Galileo tried to improve on an existing theory of the Universe that placed our planet at the center. They did not work from nothing but used beliefs that already existed in their society and tried to modify and disprove those beliefs. Time and later scientific research proved that they were right. Secondly, even after Galileo was able to prove the structure of the Solar system experimentally, his theory did not become widely accepted until the majority of people in society assimilated it. Therefore, new findings do not become accepted knowledge until they penetrate the fabric of social discourse and until enough people accept them as true.

Complete " Writing Activity 1E: Finding the Origins of Knowledge " in the "Writing Activities" section of this chapter.

Writing Dialogue [20 Best Examples + Formatting Guide]

Have you ever found yourself cringing at clunky dialogue while reading a book or watching a movie? I know I have.

It’s like nails on a chalkboard, completely ruining the experience. But on the flip side, well-written dialogue can transform a story. It’s the magic that makes characters leap off the page, immersing us in their world.

As a writer, I’m fascinated by the mechanics of great dialogue.

So here are 20 of the best examples of writing dialogue that brings your story to life.

Example 1: Dialogue that Reveals Character

Table of Contents

One of the most powerful functions of dialogue is to shed light on your characters’ personalities.

The way they speak – their word choice, tone, even their hesitations – can tell us so much about who they are. Check out this example:

“Look, I ain’t gonna sugarcoat this,” the detective growled, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the chair. “You were spotted leaving the scene, and the murder weapon’s got your prints all over it.”

Without any lengthy description, we get a sense of this detective as a no-nonsense, direct type of guy.

Example 2: Dialogue that Builds Tension

Dialogue can become this amazing tool to ratchet up the tension in a scene.

Short, clipped exchanges and carefully placed silences can leave the reader on the edge of their seat.

Here’s how it might play out:

“Do you hear that?” Sarah whispered. “Hear what?” A scratching noise echoed from the attic. Sarah’s eyes widened. “It’s coming back.”

The suspense is killing me just writing that!

Example 3: Dialogue that Drives the Plot

Conversations aren’t just about characters sitting around and chatting.

Great dialogue should actively push the story forward. It can set up a conflict, reveal key information, or change the course of events.

Take a look at this:

“I’ve made my decision,” the king declared, the crown heavy on his brow. “We go to war.”

A single line, and the whole trajectory of the story shifts.

Formatting Tips: The Basics

Now, before we get carried away, let’s cover some essential dialogue formatting rules.

Think of these as the grammar of a good conversation.

• Quotation Marks:  Yep, those little squiggles are your best friend. They signal to the reader: “Hey! Someone’s talking!”
• New Speaker, New Paragraph:  Whenever a different character starts talking, give them a new paragraph. It’s all about keeping things easy to follow.
• Dialogue Tags:  These are the little phrases like “he said” or “she replied.” Use them, but try not to overuse them. A well-placed action beat can often do a better job of showing who’s speaking.

Example 4: Dialogue that Creates Humor

Dialogue can be ridiculously funny when done well.

The key? Snappy exchanges, playful misunderstandings, and just a dash of absurdity. Consider this:

“I saw the weirdest thing at the grocery store today,” Tom said, “A woman arguing with a head of lettuce.” “Was she winning?” Lily asked, a grin playing on her lips.

You can almost hear the deadpan delivery, can’t you?

Example 5: Dialogue that Shows Relationships

The way characters speak to each other says a ton about the dynamics between them.

Is there warmth, hostility, an underlying power struggle? Dialogue can paint a crystal-clear picture. Imagine this exchange:

“You didn’t do the dishes again?” Sarah sighed, hands planted on her hips. “Aw, c’mon babe. I was busy,” Mike whined, avoiding her gaze.

We instantly sense the long-suffering tone from Sarah and the playful guilt from Mike.

Example 6: Dialogue with Subtext

The most interesting dialogue often has layers. What the characters say might not be exactly what they mean.

This is where subtext comes in – the unspoken thoughts and feelings bubbling beneath the surface.

Take this snippet:

“It’s a nice ring,” Emily said, her voice flat. “You don’t like it?” Mark’s brow furrowed. Emily shrugged. “It’s fine.”

Is Emily truly indifferent? Or is she masking disappointment, perhaps a sense of something not being quite right? Subtext makes us read between the lines.

Formatting Tips: Getting Fancy

Now, let’s spice things up with a few more advanced formatting tricks:

• Ellipses (…):  These little dots are perfect for showing a character trailing off, hesitating, or searching for words. Example: “I…I don’t know what to say.”
• Em Dashes (—):  These guys can interrupt a thought or indicate a sudden change in direction. Example: “I was going to apologize, but then — well, you’re still being a jerk.”
• Internal Dialogue:  Instead of quotation marks, sometimes you’ll want to italicize a character’s inner thoughts. Example:  Why did I say that? I’m such an idiot.

Cautionary Note

It’s important to remember: dialogue shouldn’t feel like an interrogation. Avoid rigid “question-answer, question-answer” patterns. Real conversations flow and meander naturally.

Example 7: Dialogue with Dialects and Accents

Regional dialects and accents can bring so much flavor to your characters, but it’s a delicate balance.

You want to add authenticity without it becoming a caricature or making it hard to understand.

Here’s a subtle example:

“Well, I’ll be darned,” drawled the farmer, squinting at the sky. “Looks like a storm’s brewin’.”

Notice how just a few word choices and a slight change in pronunciation hint at the speaker’s background.

Example 8: Dialogue in Groups

Writing conversations with more than two people can get chaotic fast. The key is clarity.

Here are a few tips:

• Strong Dialogue Tags:  Sometimes, you need to be more specific than just “he said” or “she said”. Example: “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed Sarah.
• Action Beats:  Break up chunks of dialogue with actions that show who’s speaking. Example: Tom slammed his fist on the table. “I won’t stand for this!”

Example 9: Dialogue Over the Phone (or Other Technology)

Conversations where characters aren’t physically together pose unique challenges.

You can’t rely on body language cues. Instead, focus on conveying tone and potential misunderstandings.

For instance:

“Hello?” Sarah’s voice crackled through the phone. A long pause. “Sarah, is that you?” “Mom? Why are you whispering?”

Instantly there’s a sense of distance and something not being quite right.

Example 10: Inner Monologue with a Twist

We often think of internal dialogue as a single character reflecting, but sometimes our inner voices can argue.

This can be a powerful way to showcase internal conflict.

Here’s how it might look:

You should just tell him how you feel, one voice chimed. Are you crazy? the other shrieked back. He’ll never feel the same way .

This creates a vivid picture of a character torn between opposing desires.

Example 11: Dialogue With a Manipulative Character

Manipulative characters often use language as a weapon.

They might use guilt trips, flattery, or veiled threats to get what they want.

Consider this:

“After everything I’ve done for you…” The old woman sighed, a flicker of disappointment in her eyes. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t expect gratitude.”

Notice how she doesn’t directly ask for anything, instead hinting at a debt, leaving the listener feeling uneasy and obligated.

Example 12: Dialogue Across Time Periods

If you’re writing historical fiction or anything with time travel elements, you’ll need to capture the distinct speech patterns of different eras.

Imagine this exchange:

“Gadzooks! What manner of contraption is this?” The Victorian gentleman exclaimed, staring in bewilderment at the smartphone. “It’s a phone,” the teenager replied, barely suppressing a laugh. “Let me show you.”

This little snippet highlights the potential for both humor and linguistic challenges when worlds collide.

Formatting Tip: Dialogue Without Tags

Sometimes, for a rapid-fire or dreamlike effect, you might want to ditch the “he said” or “she asked” altogether.

It’s a bold move, but it can be effective if done sparingly.

Check this out:

“Where are you going?” “Away.” “When will you be back?” “I don’t know.” “Please don’t leave me.”

This creates a sense of urgency, the raw exchange forcing us to focus solely on the words themselves.

Example 13: Dialogue that Shows Transformation

A great way to showcase how a character develops is through shifts in how they speak.

Maybe they become bolder, quieter, or their vocabulary changes.

Let’s see an example:

Scene 1: “I-I don’t know,” Emily whimpered, cowering in the corner. Scene 2 (Later in the story): “That’s it. I’m not taking this anymore!” Emily declared, her chin held high.

The dialogue itself reflects her transformation from victim to someone ready to stand up for herself.

Example 14: Dialogue that’s Just Plain Weird

It’s okay to get strange sometimes.

Absurdist humor or unsettling conversations can add a unique flavor to your story. Just be sure it fits the overall tone.

“Do you believe in cucumbers?” the man asked, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Excuse me?” “Cucumbers, my dear. Agents of the underground vegetable kingdom.”

This immediately creates a sense of oddness and perhaps a touch of unease. Is this guy crazy, or is there something more going on?

Example 15: Dialogue with a Purpose

Remember, good dialogue isn’t just about being entertaining.

It should move your story along. Here are some functions dialogue can serve:

• Providing Exposition:  Sometimes, you need to inform the reader of backstory or world-building details. Trickle information through natural conversation rather than an information dump.
• Foreshadowing:  Subtle hints within a conversation can foreshadow future events or create a sense of unease for the reader.
• Revealing a Twist:  A single line of dialogue can completely flip the script and reframe everything that came before.

Example 16: Dialogue with Non-Verbal Elements

So much of communication happens beyond just words.

Sighs, laughs, and gestures can add richness to dialogue on the page.

“I’m fine,” she said, crossing her arms and looking away.

Notice how the body language contradicts her words, hinting at inner turmoil.

Example 17: Silence as Dialogue

Sometimes, what isn’t said is the most powerful thing of all.

A pregnant pause or a character refusing to speak can convey volumes.

Imagine this:

“So, will you help me or not?” Tom pleaded. Sarah stared at him, her lips a thin line. Finally, she turned and walked away.

The lack of a verbal response speaks louder than any words could.

Example 18: Dialogue With Humorous Effect

A well-timed O.S. voice can deliver a funny remark or punchline, undercutting the seriousness of a scene or taking a moment in an unexpected comedic direction.

INT. CLASSROOM – DAY The teacher drones on about the causes of the American Revolution, his voice as dull as the worn textbook in front of him. KEVIN tries to stifle his yawns, failing miserably. STUDENT (O.S.) Is he ever going to stop talking? My brain just turned to mush. Snickers ripple through the class. The teacher pauses, a look of annoyance flickering across his face. Kevin shoots a desperate look towards the source of the O.S. voice.

• Timing is everything. The best comedic O.S. lines act as a witty reaction to something else happening in a scene. The student’s comment comes right as Kevin’s boredom peaks.
• Subverting expectations is funny. The audience expects the scene to continue with a stern reprimand for speaking out of turn, but the script doesn’t give us that. This leaves room for further humor.
• Consider the tone of the voice – sarcastic, matter-of-fact, or outright whiny? This adds to the comedic effect.

Example 19: Dialogue With Unexpected Reveals

Think of this as a surprise twist using O.S. dialogue.

The audience (and maybe even some characters) are led to believe one thing, only for an O.S. voice to reveal something completely unexpected, shifting the scene’s dynamic.

INT. POLICE INTERROGATION ROOM – NIGHTDETECTIVE HARRIS paces in front of a nervous SUSPECT. Photos of the crime scene are scattered on the table. HARRIS Don’t lie to me! We’ve got witnesses who saw you at the scene. SUSPECT I – I swear, I had nothing to do with it! I was… I was with my girlfriend. Harris leans in, a triumphant glint in her eyes. She claps her hands sharply, startling the suspect. WOMAN (O.S.) That’s a lie! He was nowhere near me last night! The suspect whips around. His face pales as we hear the sound of the interrogation room door swinging open…

• The power lies in the build-up. The initial dialogue and the characters’ reactions should lead the audience to believe one outcome, making the O.S. interruption all the more impactful.
• Consider who speaks the O.S. line. Is it someone the audience recognizes, or a totally new character whose identity becomes a new mystery?
• Play with the proximity of the voice. Is it right outside the room, adding to the dramatic reveal as the door opens, or is it more distant – perhaps a voice over an intercom – for an even more unsettling effect?

Example 20: Dialogue With a “Haunted” Feeling

Explanation: O.S. can be used to create an eerie or unsettling atmosphere, particularly in horror or psychological thrillers. This could be unexplained voices, creepy whispers, or sounds that hint at a supernatural (or simply unnerving) presence.

INT. OLD MANSION – NIGHTSARAH explores the abandoned mansion, flashlight cutting through the thick dust. Cobwebs cling to every surface. A faint WHISPER drifts through the air, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Sarah freezes. VOICE (O.S.) Get out… leave this place… Sarah’s breath catches in her throat. She hesitantly follows the direction of the voice, her flashlight beam trembling.

• Less is more. The vaguer and more inexplicable the O.S. voice, the more chilling it becomes.
• Layer sounds for a full creepy effect. Combine whispers with unexpected bangs, creaks, or the faint sound of footsteps following behind Sarah.
• Play with audience expectations. If the script initially leads the audience to think the house is merely abandoned, the O.S. voices become that much more terrifying.

Here is a good video about writing dialogue:

Additional Dialogue Tips & Tricks

• Read Your Dialogue Aloud:  This is the best way to catch awkward phrasing or unnatural rhythms. Our ears often pick up on what our eyes might miss.
• Less is More:  Don’t feel the need to have every single interaction be profound. Sometimes a simple “Hey” or “Thanks” can do the job just fine.
• Eavesdrop:  Paying attention to real-life conversations is fantastic research. Note the pauses, the filler words, the way people interrupt each other.

Final Thoughts: Writing Dialogue

Phew! We did it!

Does that feel like a solid collection of dialogue examples? We haven’t covered absolutely every scenario, but I hope these illustrate the vast potential within dialogue to bring your stories to life.

Read This Next:

• How To Use Action Tags in Dialogue: Ultimate Guide
• How Do Writers Fill a Natural Pause in Dialogue? [7 Crazy Effective Ways]
• Can You Start a Novel with Dialogue?
• How To Write A Southern Accent (17 Tips + Examples)
• How to Write a French Accent (13 Best Tips with Examples)

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Last updated on Jul 24, 2023

15 Examples of Great Dialogue (And Why They Work So Well)

Great dialogue is hard to pin down, but you know it when you hear or see it. In the earlier parts of this guide, we showed you some well-known tips and rules for writing dialogue. In this section, we'll show you those rules in action with 15 examples of great dialogue, breaking down exactly why they work so well.

1. Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered 

In the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, we meet Willa Knox, a middle-aged and newly unemployed writer who has just inherited a ramshackle house. 

     “The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”      She took this news as a blood-rush to the ears: a roar of peasant ancestors with rocks in their fists, facing the evictor. But this man was a contractor. Willa had called him here and she could send him away. She waited out her panic while he stood looking at her shambles, appearing to nurse some satisfaction from his diagnosis. She picked out words.      “It’s not a living thing. You can’t just pronounce it dead. Anything that goes wrong with a structure can be replaced with another structure. Am I right?”      “Correct. What I am saying is that the structure needing to be replaced is all of it. I’m sorry. Your foundation is nonexistent.”

Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as "life with the boring bits cut out." In this passage, Kingsolver cuts out the boring parts of Willa's conversation with her contractor and brings us right to the tensest, most interesting part of the conversation.

By entering their conversation late , the reader is spared every tedious detail of their interaction.

Instead of a blow-by-blow account of their negotiations (what she needs done, when he’s free, how she’ll be paying), we’re dropped right into the emotional heart of the discussion. The novel opens with the narrator learning that the home she cherishes can’t be salvaged. 

By starting off in the middle of (relatively obscure) dialogue, it takes a moment for the reader to orient themselves in the story and figure out who is speaking, and what they’re speaking about. This disorientation almost mirrors Willa’s own reaction to the bad news, as her expectations for a new life in her new home are swiftly undermined.

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2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

In the first piece of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice , we meet Mr and Mrs Bennet, as Mrs Bennet attempts to draw her husband into a conversation about neighborhood gossip.

     “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”      Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.      “But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”      Mr. Bennet made no answer.      “Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.      “You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”      This was invitation enough.      “Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

Austen’s dialogue is always witty, subtle, and packed with character. This extract from Pride and Prejudice is a great example of dialogue being used to develop character relationships . 

We instantly learn everything we need to know about the dynamic between Mr and Mrs Bennet’s from their first interaction: she’s chatty, and he’s the beleaguered listener who has learned to entertain her idle gossip, if only for his own sake (hence “you want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it”).

There is even a clear difference between the two characters visually on the page: Mr Bennet responds in short sentences, in simple indirect speech, or not at all, but this is “invitation enough” for Mrs Bennet to launch into a rambling and extended response, dominating the conversation in text just as she does audibly.

The fact that Austen manages to imbue her dialogue with so much character-building realism means we hardly notice the amount of crucial plot exposition she has packed in here. This heavily expository dialogue could be a drag to get through, but Austen’s colorful characterization means she slips it under the radar with ease, forwarding both our understanding of these people and the world they live in simultaneously.

3. Naomi Alderman, The Power

In The Power , young women around the world suddenly find themselves capable of generating and controlling electricity. In this passage, between two boys and a girl who just used those powers to light her cigarette.

     Kyle gestures with his chin and says, “Heard a bunch of guys killed a girl in Nebraska last week for doing that.”      “For smoking? Harsh.”      Hunter says, “Half the kids in school know you can do it.”      “So what?”      Hunter says, “Your dad could use you in his factory. Save money on electricity.”      “He’s not my dad.”      She makes the silver flicker at the ends of her fingers again. The boys watch.

Alderman here uses a show, don’t tell approach to expositional dialogue. Within this short exchange, we discover a lot about Allie, her personal circumstances, and the developing situation elsewhere. We learn that women are being punished harshly for their powers; that Allie is expected to be ashamed of those powers and keep them a secret, but doesn’t seem to care to do so; that her father is successful in industry; and that she has a difficult relationship with him. Using dialogue in this way prevents info-dumping backstory all at once, and instead helps us learn about the novel’s world in a natural way.

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4. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Here, friends Tommy and Kathy have a conversation after Tommy has had a meltdown. After being bullied by a group of boys, he has been stomping around in the mud, the precise reaction they were hoping to evoke from him.

     “Tommy,” I said, quite sternly. “There’s mud all over your shirt.”      “So what?” he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.      “It’s nothing to worry about.” I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. “It’ll come off. If you can’t get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.”      He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily, “It’s nothing to do with you anyway.”

This episode from Never Let Me Go highlights the power of interspersing action beats within dialogue. These action beats work in several ways to add depth to what would otherwise be a very simple and fairly nondescript exchange.  Firstly, they draw attention to the polo shirt, and highlight its potential significance in the plot. Secondly, they help to further define Kathy’s relationship with Tommy. 

We learn through Tommy’s surprised reaction that he didn’t think Kathy knew how much he loved his seemingly generic polo shirt. This moment of recognition allows us to see that she cares for him and understands him more deeply than even he realized. Kathy breaking the silence before it can “humiliate” Tommy further emphasizes her consideration for him. While the dialogue alone might make us think Kathy is downplaying his concerns with pragmatic advice, it is the action beats that tell the true story here.

5. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit  

The eponymous hobbit Bilbo is engaged in a game of riddles with the strange creature Gollum.

     "What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.       "Not fair! not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?"      Bilbo seeing what had happened and having nothing better to ask stuck to his question. "What have I got in my pocket?" he said louder. "S-s-s-s-s," hissed Gollum. "It must give us three guesseses, my precious, three guesseses."      "Very well! Guess away!" said Bilbo.      "Handses!" said Gollum.      "Wrong," said Bilbo, who had luckily just taken his hand out again. "Guess again!"      "S-s-s-s-s," said Gollum, more upset than ever. 

Tolkein’s dialogue for Gollum is a masterclass in creating distinct character voices . By using a repeated catchphrase (“my precious”) and unconventional spelling and grammar to reflect his unusual speech pattern, Tolkien creates an idiosyncratic, unique (and iconic) speech for Gollum. This vivid approach to formatting dialogue, which is almost a transliteration of Gollum's sounds, allows readers to imagine his speech pattern and practically hear it aloud.

We wouldn’t recommend using this extreme level of idiosyncrasy too often in your writing — it can get wearing for readers after a while, and Tolkien deploys it sparingly, as Gollum’s appearances are limited to a handful of scenes. However, you can use Tolkien’s approach as inspiration to create (slightly more subtle) quirks of speech for your own characters.

6. F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The narrator, Nick has just done his new neighbour Gatsby a favor by inviting his beloved Daisy over to tea. Perhaps in return, Gatsby then attempts to make a shady business proposition.

     “There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.      “Would you rather put it off for a few days?” I asked.      “Oh, it isn’t about that. At least —” He fumbled with a series of beginnings. “Why, I thought — why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you?”      “Not very much.”      This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.       “I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my — you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a little side line, if you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much — You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”      “Trying to.” 

This dialogue from The Great Gatsby is a great example of how to make dialogue sound natural. Gatsby tripping over his own words (even interrupting himself , as marked by the em-dashes) not only makes his nerves and awkwardness palpable but also mimics real speech. Just as real people often falter and make false starts when they’re speaking off the cuff, Gatsby too flounders, giving us insight into his self-doubt; his speech isn’t polished and perfect, and neither is he despite all his efforts to appear so.

Fitzgerald also creates a distinctive voice for Gatsby by littering his speech with the character's signature term of endearment, “old sport”. We don’t even really need dialogue markers to know who’s speaking here — a sign of very strong characterization through dialogue.

7. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet  

In this first meeting between the two heroes of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, John is introduced to Sherlock while the latter is hard at work in the lab.

      “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”      “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.      “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself. “The question now is about hemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?”     “It is interesting, chemically, no doubt,” I answered, “but practically— ”      “Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains. Come over here now!” He seized me by the coat-sleeve in his eagerness, and drew me over to the table at which he had been working. “Let us have some fresh blood,” he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette. “Now, I add this small quantity of blood to a litre of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. I have no doubt, however, that we shall be able to obtain the characteristic reaction.” As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.      “Ha! ha!” he cried, clapping his hands, and looking as delighted as a child with a new toy. “What do you think of that?”

This passage uses a number of the key techniques for writing naturalistic and exciting dialogue, including characters speaking over one another and the interspersal of action beats. 

Sherlock cutting off Watson to launch into a monologue about his blood experiment shows immediately where Sherlock’s interest lies — not in small talk, or the person he is speaking to, but in his own pursuits, just like earlier in the conversation when he refuses to explain anything to John and is instead self-absorbedly “chuckling to himself”. This helps establish their initial rapport (or lack thereof) very quickly.

Breaking up that monologue with snippets of him undertaking the forensic tests allows us to experience the full force of his enthusiasm over it without having to read an uninterrupted speech about the ins and outs of a science experiment.

Starting to think you might like to read some Sherlock? Check out our guide to the Sherlock Holmes canon !

8. Brandon Taylor, Real Life

Here, our protagonist Wallace is questioned by Ramon, a friend-of-a-friend, over the fact that he is considering leaving his PhD program.

     Wallace hums. “I mean, I wouldn’t say that I want to leave, but I’ve thought about it, sure.”     “Why would you do that? I mean, the prospects for… black people, you know?”        “What are the prospects for black people?” Wallace asks, though he knows he will be considered the aggressor for this question.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is drawn from the author’s own experiences as a queer Black man, attempting to navigate the unwelcoming world of academia, navigating the world of academia, and so it’s no surprise that his dialogue rings so true to life — it’s one of the reasons the novel is one of our picks for must-read books by Black authors . 

This episode is part of a pattern where Wallace is casually cornered and questioned by people who never question for a moment whether they have the right to ambush him or criticize his choices. The use of indirect dialogue at the end shows us this is a well-trodden path for Wallace: he has had this same conversation several times, and can pre-empt the exact outcome.

This scene is also a great example of the dramatic significance of people choosing not to speak. The exchange happens in front of a big group, but — despite their apparent discomfort —  nobody speaks up to defend Wallace, or to criticize Ramon’s patronizing microaggressions. Their silence is deafening, and we get a glimpse of Ramon’s isolation due to the complacency of others, all due to what is not said in this dialogue example.

9. Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

In this short story, an unnamed man and a young woman discuss whether or not they should terminate a pregnancy while sitting on a train platform.

     “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”      “And you really want to?”      “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you really don’t want to.”      “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”      “I love you now. You know I love you.”      “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”      “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”      “If I do it you won’t ever worry?”      “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”

This example of dialogue from Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants moves at quite a clip. The conversation quickly bounces back and forth between the speakers, and the call-and-response format of the woman asking and the man answering is effective because it establishes a clear dynamic between the two speakers: the woman is the one seeking reassurance and trying to understand the man’s feelings, while he is the one who is ultimately in control of the situation.

Note the sparing use of dialogue markers: this minimalist approach keeps the dialogue brisk, and we can still easily understand who is who due to the use of a new paragraph when the speaker changes .

Like this classic author’s style? Head over to our selection of the 11 best Ernest Hemingway books .

10. Madeline Miller, Circe

In Madeline Miller’s retelling of Greek myth, we witness a conversation between the mythical enchantress Circe and Telemachus (son of Odysseus).

     “You do not grieve for your father?”        “I do. I grieve that I never met the father everyone told me I had.”           I narrowed my eyes. “Explain.”      “I am no storyteller.”      “I am not asking for a story. You have come to my island. You owe me truth.”       A moment passed, and then he nodded. “You will have it.” 

This short and punchy exchange hits on a lot of the stylistic points we’ve covered so far. The conversation is a taut tennis match between the two speakers as they volley back and forth with short but impactful sentences, and unnecessary dialogue tags have been shaved off . It also highlights Circe’s imperious attitude, a result of her divine status. Her use of short, snappy declaratives and imperatives demonstrates that she’s used to getting her own way and feels no need to mince her words.

11. Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

This is an early conversation between seventeen-year-old Elio and his family’s handsome new student lodger, Oliver.

     What did one do around here? Nothing. Wait for summer to end. What did one do in the winter, then?      I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, “Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right?”      I liked having my mind read. He’d pick up on dinner drudgery sooner than those before him.      “Actually, in the winter the place gets very gray and dark. We come for Christmas. Otherwise it’s a ghost town.”      “And what else do you do here at Christmas besides roast chestnuts and drink eggnog?”      He was teasing. I offered the same smile as before. He understood, said nothing, we laughed.      He asked what I did. I played tennis. Swam. Went out at night. Jogged. Transcribed music. Read.      He said he jogged too. Early in the morning. Where did one jog around here? Along the promenade, mostly. I could show him if he wanted.      It hit me in the face just when I was starting to like him again: “Later, maybe.”

Dialogue is one of the most crucial aspects of writing romance — what’s a literary relationship without some flirty lines? Here, however, Aciman gives us a great example of efficient dialogue. By removing unnecessary dialogue and instead summarizing with narration, he’s able to confer the gist of the conversation without slowing down the pace unnecessarily. Instead, the emphasis is left on what’s unsaid, the developing romantic subtext. 

Furthermore, the fact that we receive this scene in half-reported snippets rather than as an uninterrupted transcript emphasizes the fact that this is Elio’s own recollection of the story, as the manipulation of the dialogue in this way serves to mimic the nostalgic haziness of memory.

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12. George Eliot, Middlemarch

Two of Eliot’s characters, Mary and Rosamond, are out shopping,

     When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass, she said laughingly —      “What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most unbecoming companion.”      “Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality,” said Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck in the glass.      “You mean my beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically.       Rosamond thought, “Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.” Aloud she said, “What have you been doing lately?”      “I? Oh, minding the house — pouring out syrup — pretending to be amiable and contented — learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.”

This excerpt, a conversation between the level-headed Mary and vain Rosamond, is an example of dialogue that develops character relationships naturally. Action descriptors allow us to understand what is really happening in the conversation. 

Whilst the speech alone might lead us to believe Rosamond is honestly (if clumsily) engaging with her friend, the description of her simultaneously gazing at herself in a mirror gives us insight not only into her vanity, but also into the fact that she is not really engaged in her conversation with Mary at all.

The use of internal dialogue cut into the conversation (here formatted with quotation marks rather than the usual italics ) lets us know what Rosamond is actually thinking, and the contrast between this and what she says aloud is telling. The fact that we know she privately realizes she has offended Mary, but quickly continues the conversation rather than apologizing, is emphatic of her character. We get to know Rosamond very well within this short passage, which is a hallmark of effective character-driven dialogue.

13. John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent

Here, Mary (speaking first) reacts to her husband Ethan’s attempts to discuss his previous experiences as a disciplined soldier, his struggles in subsequent life, and his feeling of impending change.

     “You’re trying to tell me something.”      “Sadly enough, I am. And it sounds in my ears like an apology. I hope it is not.”      “I’m going to set out lunch.”

Steinbeck’s Winter of our Discontent is an acute study of alienation and miscommunication, and this exchange exemplifies the ways in which characters can fail to communicate, even when they’re speaking. The pair speaking here are trapped in a dysfunctional marriage which leaves Ethan feeling isolated, and part of his loneliness comes from the accumulation of exchanges such as this one. Whenever he tries to communicate meaningfully with his wife, she shuts the conversation down with a complete non sequitur. 

We expect Mary’s “you’re trying to tell me something” to be followed by a revelation, but Ethan is not forthcoming in his response, and Mary then exits the conversation entirely. Nothing is communicated, and the jarring and frustrating effect of having our expectations subverted goes a long way in mirroring Ethan’s own frustration.

Just like Ethan and Mary, we receive no emotional pay-off, and this passage of characters talking past one another doesn’t further the plot as we hope it might, but instead gives us insight into the extent of these characters’ estrangement.

14. Bret Easton Ellis , Less Than Zero

The disillusioned main character of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel, Clay, here catches up with a college friend, Daniel, whom he hasn’t seen in a while. 

     He keeps rubbing his mouth and when I realize that he’s not going to answer me, I ask him what he’s been doing.      “Been doing?”      “Yeah.”      “Hanging out.”      “Hanging out where?”      “Where? Around.”

Less Than Zero is an elegy to conversation, and this dialogue is an example of the many vacuous exchanges the protagonist engages in, seemingly just to fill time. The whole book is deliberately unpoetic and flat, and depicts the lives of disaffected youths in 1980s LA. Their misguided attempts to fill the emptiness within them with drink and drugs are ultimately fruitless, and it shows in their conversations: in truth, they have nothing to say to one another at all.

This utterly meaningless exchange would elsewhere be considered dead weight to a story. Here, rather than being fat in need of trimming, the empty conversation is instead thematically resonant.

15. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

The young narrator of du Maurier’s classic gothic novel here has a strained conversation with Robert, one of the young staff members at her new husband’s home, the unwelcoming Manderley.

     “Has Mr. de Winter been in?” I said.      “Yes, Madam,” said Robert; “he came in just after two, and had a quick lunch, and then went out again. He asked for you and Frith said he thought you must have gone down to see the ship.”      “Did he say when he would be back again?” I asked.      “No, Madam.”      “Perhaps he went to the beach another way,” I said; “I may have missed him.”      “Yes, Madam,” said Robert.      I looked at the cold meat and the salad. I felt empty but not hungry. I did not want cold meat now. “Will you be taking lunch?” said Robert.      “No,” I said, “No, you might bring me some tea, Robert, in the library. Nothing like cakes or scones. Just tea and bread and butter.”      “Yes, Madam.”

We’re including this one in our dialogue examples list to show you the power of everything Du Maurier doesn’t do: rather than cycling through a ton of fancy synonyms for “said”, she opts for spare dialogue and tags. 

This interaction's cold, sparse tone complements the lack of warmth the protagonist feels in the moment depicted here. By keeping the dialogue tags simple , the author ratchets up the tension —  without any distracting flourishes taking the reader out of the scene. The subtext of the conversation is able to simmer under the surface, and we aren’t beaten over the head with any stage direction extras.

The inclusion of three sentences of internal dialogue in the middle of the dialogue (“I looked at the cold meat and the salad. I felt empty but not hungry. I did not want cold meat now.”) is also a masterful touch. What could have been a single sentence is stretched into three, creating a massive pregnant pause before Robert continues speaking, without having to explicitly signpost one. Manipulating the pace of dialogue in this way and manufacturing meaningful silence is a great way of adding depth to a scene.

Phew! We've been through a lot of dialogue, from first meetings to idle chit-chat to confrontations, and we hope these dialogue examples have been helpful in illustrating some of the most common techniques.

If you’re looking for more pointers on creating believable and effective dialogue, be sure to check out our course on writing dialogue. Or, if you find you learn better through examples, you can look at our list of 100 books to read before you die — it’s packed full of expert storytellers who’ve honed the art of dialogue.

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Write, talk and rewrite: the effectiveness of a dialogic writing intervention in upper elementary education

• Open access
• Published: 30 August 2023

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• Renske Bouwer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0434-0224 1 &
• Chiel van der Veen 2 , 3  

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In this research, we developed and empirically tested a dialogic writing intervention, an integrated language approach in which grade 5/6 students learn how to write, talk about their writing with peers, and rewrite. The effectiveness of this intervention was experimentally tested in ten classes from eight schools, using a pretest–posttest control group design. Classes were randomly assigned to the intervention group (5 classes; 95 students) or control group (5 classes; 115 students). Both groups followed the same eight lessons in which students wrote four argumentative texts about sustainability. For each text, students wrote a draft version, which they discussed in groups of three students. Based on these peer conversations, students revised their text. The intervention group received additional support to foster dialogic peer conversations, including a conversation chart for students and a practice-based professional development program for teachers. Improvements in writing were measured by an argumentative writing task (same genre, but different topic; near transfer) and an instructional writing task (different genre and topic; far transfer). Text quality was holistically assessed using a benchmark rating procedure. Results show that our dialogic writing intervention with support for dialogic talk significantly improved students’ argumentative writing skills (ES = 1.09), but that the effects were not automatically transferable to another genre. Based on these results we conclude that a dialogic writing intervention is a promising approach to teach students how to talk about their texts and to write texts that are more persuasive to readers.

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In primary schools, only little teaching time is devoted to the productive language skills of writing and speaking (Inspectorate of Education, 2019 , 2021 ). Also, writing, reading and speaking are often covered in separate lessons, making it difficult for students to use language in a variety of meaningful contexts as a means of communication (Sperling, 1996 ). This is particularly problematic for the teaching of writing, as writing is a social act–writers not only write for a general purpose, but they also particularly write to communicate ideas to others (Graham, 2018 ). Demonstrating audience awareness before, during and after writing is therefore considered to be one of the most important aspects of writing proficiency (Rijlaarsdam et al., 2009 ). However, beginning writers do not automatically take the perspective of the reader into account while writing and afterwards, they hardly revise their text accordingly (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987 ; Kellogg, 2008 ). As a result, the majority of students in primary school are unable to write texts in which they successfully convey their message to a reader (Inspectorate of Education, 2021 ; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012 ).

Based on previous research (see for example Casado-Ledesma, 2021 ), we argue that fostering a direct dialogue between writers and readers can support students to become more aware of their audience, and hence, support them in writing texts in which they communicate their ideas more effectively. For this purpose, together with educational practitioners, we developed a dialogic writing intervention, which is an integrated approach to written and oral language skills in primary education. This intervention consists of three steps: (1) writing a first draft of an argumentative text, (2) engaging students in small group dialogue about their own written texts, and (3) revising their text based on these conversations. The effectiveness of this writing intervention for fifth- and sixth-grade students (aged 9–13 years) was empirically tested in this study.

Developing audience awareness through dialogic peer talk

From a sociocultural perspective, writing and speaking have a similar function: to convey information to a recipient through language (Sperling, 1996 ). However, where in spoken language there is a direct dialogue between speaker and hearer, the dialogue between writer and reader is indirect. This implies that writers have to anticipate whether their text has the intended communicative effect on the reader and adjust their text accordingly. Experienced writers do this by consistently taking a reader's perspective during the writing process (Kellogg, 2008 ). Putting themselves in the reader's shoes is, however, very difficult for beginning writers; they write as they talk, resulting in "and then, and then"-like stories (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987 ). They also hardly revise their text; once the first ideas are on paper, the text barely changes and the only revisions that they make are superficial (Chanquoy, 2001 ). This is particularly problematic when writing argumentative texts, as in this genre revision is an important process to ensure the text becomes as convincing as possible. For example, for argumentative text it is essential to critically re-read the text from the perspective of the reader, in order to determine whether the arguments are convincing enough and what substantial changes in the text are needed to persuade the reader more effectively.

Fostering a dialogue between writer and reader, combined with strategies before and after writing, can support elementary students to write persuasive texts (Casado-Ledesma, 2021 ; Rijlaarsdam et al., 2009 ). In addition, meta-analyses show strong effects of peer interaction on text quality (Graham et al., 2012 ; Koster et al., 2015 ). In these peer conversations, writers themselves experience how their text comes across to readers, which provides them with concrete suggestions for improving the text. These evidence-based instructional practices have been translated into the strategy-based writing method Tekster for upper-elementary students (Bouwer & Koster, 2016 ). Two large-scale intervention studies showed that after four months of strategy-focused instructions, the writing skills of students aged 10–12 improved by one-and-a-half grade (Bouwer et al., 2018 ; Koster et al., 2017 ). Despite these positive results, classroom observations showed that students still found it difficult to have meaningful conversations about each other's texts, taking the reader's perspective and providing the other with substantive feedback.

That peer conversations are hardly ever about arguments in the text was also seen in a small-scale pilot study with elementary students prior to the current research project (Bodewitz, 2020 ). Again, without any instructional support, peer conversations about students’ own written texts turned out to be mostly superficial and mainly focused on the formal aspects of the text, such as spelling, punctuation and layout. Also, the conversations were hardly dialogic in nature; students did not ask each other questions about the ideas in the text and rarely deepened each other's contributions. Not surprisingly, they made almost no meaningful changes when revising their text; their revisions focused mainly on superficial aspects of the text, such as language errors or layout. This raises the question of how we can support students in deepening their conversations about each other's texts.

Research on classroom conversations shows that dialogic conversations in which teachers ask open-ended questions and students are challenged to take the other's perspective, reason, think together and listen critically (Hennessy et al., 2016 ) have a positive effect on students' reasoning skills, motivation and domain-specific knowledge (Dobber, 2018 ; Resnick et al., 2015 ; Van der Veen, 2017 ). Such dialogic conversations also have a positive effect on students’ communication skills (Van der Veen et al., 2017 ). However, there is hardly any scientific research on the use of dialogic conversations in the context of writing instruction (Fisher et al., 2010 ; Herder et al., 2018 ). Also, existing research tends to be correlational and focused on how teachers employ dialogic conversation techniques during whole-class conversations (cf. Myhill & Newman, 2019 ). For example, a recent study shows that teachers' asking open-ended questions and questioning is correlated with higher text quality for argumentative writing (Al-Adeimi & O'Connor, 2021 ). Yet, little is known about what support students need to have dialogic conversations with each other about their own written texts and how this kind of dialogic peer talk improves students’ writing skills.

Research aims

In this research project, we build on the knowledge that already exists about learning to engage in dialogic conversations and explore the extent to which a dialogic writing intervention can contribute to the improvement of writing skills. More specifically, we were interested in the following research questions: what is the effect of a dialogic writing intervention on students’ writing improvements in (a) argumentative writing between pre- and posttest (same genre, near transfer; RQ1), and (b) instructional writing on the posttest (other genre, far transfer; RQ2). In addition, we examined whether (c) possible effects of the intervention on students’ writing performance at posttest can be explained by level of writing proficiency at pretest (RQ3). Finally, we investigated the fidelity and social validity of our dialogic writing intervention (RQ4).

Based on cognitive writing process theories by Flower and Hayes ( 1981 ) and Kellogg ( 2008 ) as well as sociocultural models that emphasize the importance of the reader for writing (Graham, 2018 ), we hypothesized that our dialogic writing intervention will support students with different levels of writing proficiency in becoming more aware of the intended reader and, as a result, write texts that communicate messages more effectively. With this research, we aim not only to optimize interventions for teaching writing, but also to develop more generic knowledge about how to successfully integrate different language domains such as speaking, reading and writing into classroom practice and what this requires of teachers and students.

The study obtained ethical approval from the Faculty Ethics Review Committee Humanities (FETC-GW, reference number 21–147-03). Teachers and school leaders of the participating schools were informed about the purpose and procedure of the study prior to the study and were asked to consent to data collection in the classrooms. Parents and students received the same information about the study and were asked to return signed consent forms back to the teacher. The students who did not receive permission to participate did attend the classroom program and completed the corresponding assignments as part of regular language classes, but these data were not stored and included in the data analysis. The background information of the students with permission and the written texts were stored encrypted on a secure server at the university in such a way that the data could not be traced back to individual students. The recordings of conversations and lessons have been transcribed, with any names or details traceable to individuals removed from the transcripts. The data are kept securely for 10 years and can only be accessed by involved researchers.

Participants

Teachers from ten grade 5/6 classes of eight schools and their 278 students participated in this intervention study. We received consent to participate in the study from 212 students and their parents, which is 76% of all students. Teachers and their students were randomly assigned to either the intervention group (5 teachers; 95 students) or the control group (5 teachers; 115 students). With this sample, the power is at least 0.80 to ascertain small effects in a multilevel model in which pupils are nested in classes. Specifically, an a priori power analysis for multilevel modeling (see Hox, Moerbeek, & van de Schoot, 2018 ) revealed that an effective sample size of 151 students was needed to ascertain a small effect with a power of 0.81, based on two measurement occasions, an average class size of 20 and an intraclass correlation of 0.10.

The total distribution of girls and boys in the sample was nearly equal, with 47% girls and 53% boys. The age of the students ranged from 9 to 13 years, with a mean of 10.68 years (SD = 0.73). The majority of the students (67%) were from grade 6. From only three-quarters of the students, we were able to collect additional information about their home language. This showed that a quarter of the pupils (35 out of 141 pupils) spoke another language at home besides Dutch, including Turkish (n = 7), Arabic (n = 2), Berber (n = 2), English (n = 4), Hungarian (n = 2), Cape Verdean (n = 2) and Polish (n = 1). There were no differences in student background between conditions.

Procedure and materials

The effect of the intervention was experimentally tested at the beginning of school year 2021–2022 using a pretest–posttest control group design. Both groups followed the same eight-week lesson program for dialogic writing, but the intervention group received additional support for dialogic conversations, including a conversation chart for students and a Practice-Based Professional Development program for teachers (PBPD; Harris et al., 2023 ). By implementing the same writing lesson program in the control group, instead of using a business-as-usual control group, we ensured that students in both conditions spent the same amount of time and attention on writing, discussing texts and rewriting. Also, teachers were not aware of the existence of two different conditions.

Lesson program for dialogic writing in the control and intervention group

Together with experienced primary school teachers and teacher trainers, we have developed a dialogic writing program consisting of eight lessons – one lesson each week. This lesson program was assigned to all participating classes, in both the intervention and control condition. During this lesson program, students wrote four argumentative texts about sustainability: (1) a personal experience, (2) an argumentative text, (3) a persuasive letter, and (4) a reply to a letter. Sustainability is a meaningful theme that is urgent for students; after all, they are the next generation living on this planet. The four texts students had to write during the lesson series built on each other in terms of content and audience, in which taking the reader's perspective becomes increasingly complex. That is, in lessons 1 and 2 they began writing a text based on a personal experience in which they give an example of something they already do to live sustainably, such as reusing clothes or collecting plastic waste. The second text they wrote in lessons 3 and 4 is an argumentative text in which they presented factual arguments to defend a certain position related to sustainability. Besides, they backed it up with arguments from source texts. They also learned to rebut possible counter arguments from peers. The third text students wrote in lessons 5 and 6 was a persuasive letter to a yet unknown student from another school. The goal was to persuade the person with personal and factual arguments to implement their sustainable idea. To create a meaningful context, the students actually sent the letters to students from another school. The final text students wrote in lessons 7 and 8 was a response to the letter they received from someone else. Students read the letter and discussed whether they were convinced by the other person's sustainable idea and why. Based on that discussion, they wrote a letter back.

The four texts are characterized by the communicative aspect of writing: they are written to convince a reader to also take action for a sustainable planet. To help students achieve this goal, we used a similar format in all of the lessons. In the first lesson for each new text, students gathered ideas for their text by reading source texts and discussing their ideas with peers. They incorporated those ideas into a first version of their text. In the following lesson, they shared and discussed their texts in groups of three, after which students revised their text individually. By talking with readers before, during and after writing, they learned which arguments already work well and where they needed to add more information or additional arguments in the text to convince the reader.

Intervention group: additional support for dialogic talk about writing

To further deepen students' conversations about each other's texts, and to make them more dialogic, we added additional support for both students and teachers in the dialogic writing intervention condition. To do so, we developed a conversation chart with examples of various dialogic conversation techniques, such as asking open questions, deepening each other's contributions, critical listening and summarizing, see also Appendix 1 . The conversation chart consists of the following four steps:

The writer reads her/his own text while the other two students listen and think about what the writer wants to say with the text.

The writer starts the conversation with the questions from the conversation card, such as whether the text is clear and convincing.

Readers respond to the writer's questions and are encouraged to respond to each other and to ask follow-up questions, so that students explain their feedback and deepen the conversations.

The writer summarizes what feedback she/he would like to work with in revising the text, to establish the link between the conversation and the rewriting process.

Next to support for the students, the teachers in the intervention group received an intensive PBPD over the course of the intervention to adequately implement the principles of dialogic writing in their classrooms. This program consisted of a three-hour workshop and a manual prior to the intervention that provided teachers that participated in the intervention condition with an introduction on the theory behind dialogic writing and how to use and promote dialogic conversations with students. This included techniques for how to invite students to share their ideas by asking open-ended questions and providing time for students to think, as well as to promote peer discussion by connecting the ideas of students and asking follow-up questions to deepen the conversation. In addition to these conversation techniques, teachers learned how to focus on the communicative effectiveness of the text by discussing the most important criteria for argumentative texts, such as well-supported arguments, a clear line of reasoning and good choice of words. The teachers observed and discussed videos in which another teacher modeled how to apply these principles of dialogic writing during a writing lesson. There were also exercises in which teachers could experience for themselves the benefits of dialogic conversation for rewriting their own text. Finally, they received six basic conversation rules for promoting good peer conversations in an open, safe and respectful setting, such as listening to each other and really trying to understand each other by asking questions and responding to each other, see also Appendix 2 .

In addition to the workshop, teachers received sustained support during the intervention period. This included individual coaching for lessons 2 and 6 in their own classroom context from one of the teacher trainers from the consortium. These trainers observed lessons 2 and 6 in the classroom and afterwards reflected with the teachers on how they implemented the principles of dialogic writing in practice. After lessons 4 and 7 there was an online training meeting with all participating teachers and teacher trainers, during which teachers discussed with each other what went well and what they found difficult. They also reflected on each other's lessons using short video clips from their own practices.

Measuring fidelity of implementation and social validity of the lesson program

To investigate whether teachers implemented the dialogic writing lessons into their classroom practice as intended, we focused on five key elements of fidelity as suggested by Smith et al. ( 2007 ): design, PBPD, intervention delivery, intervention receipt, and intervention enactment. First, the design of our intervention was developed in close collaboration with teachers, and piloted in an earlier study (Bodewitz, 2020 ). Furthermore, we made sure that the goals of our writing lessons covered the goals of Dutch primary schools. We asked all participating teachers in the control and intervention condition to keep a logbook for each lesson to investigate the extent they were able to conduct all lessons according to our teacher manual. They were asked to provide the following information about each lesson: preparation time, lesson duration, appreciation of the lesson (on a scale from 1 to 10; 1 = very low, 10 = very high), aspects that went well, aspects that went less well, and whether they made any modifications or adjustments to the lesson. Teachers also shared all draft and revised versions of the texts that were written during the lessons, as well as audio recordings of the peer conversations and classroom instructions.

Our PBPD was delivered by experienced teacher trainers that were part of our consortium. All teachers in the intervention condition received the same PBPD to maximize fidelity of intervention delivery . Furthermore, during the intervention the teacher trainers and research team had regular meetings to discuss intervention delivery. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with all participating teachers to get in-depth insight in their experiences with implementing the principles of dialogic writing in the classroom, as well as their satisfaction with the developed teaching materials and the additional conversational support (only for teachers in the intervention condition). This provides us with information on the intervention receipt and social validity of the lesson program for dialogic writing. Interviews were conducted by the first author, and they were video-taped and transcribed.

Finally, to evaluate intervention enactment , logbooks, transcriptions of post-interviews, text written by students, and audio recordings of peer conversations and classroom instructions were examined and checked against our intervention materials (e.g., teacher manual, workshop, etc.). Although teachers were forced to make some changes due to school closings and time constraints, in general no abnormalities were found. However, not all teachers were able to complete all steps of the lessons, see Results for more details on intervention enactment.

Pre- and post-measurement of text quality

To measure the effects of the dialogic writing intervention on writing skills, students wrote a persuasive text before and after the lesson series on a topic that was different from the focus of the lesson series. As in the lesson series, the goal was to persuade peers, this time not about a sustainable idea, but about a pet for the classroom (pre-test) and about an outing to an amusement park with the whole class (post-test). Afterwards, they also wrote an information letter to investigate whether the effects of the intervention were transferable to another genre. In this text, they gave advice on how to write a good letter to a fictional student coming to the Netherlands next year. These writing tasks were already developed, tested, and used to measure writing progress in two large-scale intervention studies for students in comparable grades (Bouwer & Koster, 2016 ).

The quality of students’ written texts at the pre- and posttest was assessed holistically and comparatively based on its communicative effectiveness by juries of three independent raters using a benchmark rating scale with five benchmark texts of increasing text quality (cf. Bouwer & Koster, 2016 ; Bouwer, Van Steendam, & Lesterhuis, 2023 ). The scale on which the benchmarks are placed can be considered as an interval scale. The benchmark in the center of the scale is a text of average quality for students in upper-elementary grades, which is assigned an arbitrary score of 100 points. The other texts on the scale are one and two standard deviations below average, with a score of respectively 85 and 70 points, and one and two standard deviations above average, with a score of 115 and 130 points. Raters had to compare each student text to the five benchmarks on the scale and score it accordingly. These scores could theoretically range from 0 to infinite, however, in practice the scores across the three writing tasks ranged from 57 to 141 points. This corresponds to three standard deviations below and above average. We used the same benchmark scale for the persuasive writing task at the pre- and posttest, as previous research demonstrated that the same benchmark rating scale can be used reliably and validly for rating texts in the same genre but on a different topic (Bouwer, Koster, & Van den Bergh, 2023 ). For the informative writing task, we used a different benchmark scale. Both benchmark scales were validated in previous research (Bouwer & Koster, 2016 ).

There were nine raters in total, who were all experienced teachers. They received a short training in which they learned to use the benchmark scales. After this, they independently rated three subsets of all the texts, blind to condition. using a prefixed design of overlapping rater teams, each text was rated by three raters. This overlapping rater design also allows to approximate the reliability of both individual and jury raters (Van den Bergh & Eiting, 1989 ). The average reliability of jury ratings across the three tasks was high, with ρ  = 0.88 for the first writing task, ρ  = 0.86 for the second writing task, and ρ  = 0.93 for the third writing task. The final text quality score for each text was determined by the average score of the three raters.

Data-analysis

The data of the present study are hierarchically structured. That is, writing scores (level 1, N = 530) are nested within students (level 2, N s  = 212), and students are nested within classes (level 3, N c  = 10). To take this nested structure into account, multilevel modeling was applied, using linear mixed model analyses with maximum likelihood (ML) estimations in SPSS (version 27) following the procedures of Snijders and Bosker ( 2012 ). In the multilevel models all students, including those with partly missing values, are taken into account. In total, percentages of missing data ranged from 11.8% for the pretest to 13.2% for the first posttest and 25.0% for the second posttest. Only 8.5% of the students missed scores for both posttest measures. Little's MCAR test also revealed that the missing values were missing at random for the three measurement occasions (χ 2 (9) = 14.15, p  = 0.12).

In the random intercept-only model (Model 0) we estimated the ICC as an indication of the proportion of variance that can be attributed to classes and students. To test the effects of the intervention on students’ writing performance, five multilevel models were compared in which parameters were added systematically. Model 1 is the homoscedastic model in which we held the variance between measurement occasions constant. This model served as a baseline to which we compared the more comprehensive models. In this basic model we accounted for random effects between classes (S 2 c ) and between and within students (respectively S 2 s and S 2 e ). That is, scores on the main variables were allowed to vary between and within students, and between classes. In Model 2, measurement occasions were considered as a repeated measure (unstructured), in which text quality scores were allowed to vary between measurement occasion. In Model 3, condition (i.e., intervention group versus control group) was added to investigate the main effect of additional support for students and teachers (e.g., PBPD and conversation chart). Next, in Model 4, we added the interaction effect between condition and measurement occasion, to investigate the effect of the intervention over time. Finally, two control variables were added as fixed effects: gender and grade. Models were compared using the log-likelihood ratio tests for model improvement (alpha of 0.05).

Effect of the dialogic writing intervention on text quality

The random intercept-only model (Model 0) confirmed that the text quality scores are clustered within students and classes. In particular, the total variance in text quality scores was 226.73, with considerable variance between classes and students of respectively 28.24 and 59.06. Hence, 13% of the total variance in text quality is attributable to classes (ICC = 0.13).

Table 1 shows the results of the fit and comparisons of the planned models 1–5 as well as the parameter estimates for each model. As can be seen, the heteroscedastic model in which the variances were allowed to differ between measurement occasion fitted the data better than the homoscedastic model (Model 2 versus Model 1, χ 2 (4) = 7.20, p  < 0.01), indicating that variance in text quality scores between students differed between measurement occasions. In fact, parameter estimates show that the variance between students decreased between the first and second measurement occasion, indicating that students’ writing became more homogeneous after the lesson program for a different writing task in the same genre (near transfer). The variance between students increased again for the third measurement occasion, in which students wrote a text in a different genre (far transfer). Further, the parameter estimates show that text quality scores covaried between measurement occasions, indicating a positive correlation between the three writing tasks.

Results of the model comparison further show that there was no main effect of condition (Model 3 versus Model 2, χ 2 (1) = 2.26, p  = 0.13), indicating that the average writing scores were the same for students in the two conditions. There was, however, an interaction effect between condition and measurement occasion (Model 4 versus Model 3, χ 2 (3) = 18.96, p  < 0.001). This means that, while taking into account the variance between classes and students, text quality scores measured at two occasions were not the same for students in the intervention condition and the control condition. The differences in text quality scores between condition and measurement occasion are presented in Table 2 below. The interaction effect was also apparent when controlling for the effects of gender and age (Model 5 versus Model 4, χ 2 (2) = 48.59, p  < 0.001). In particular, average writing scores were 4.18 points ( SE  = 1.98) lower for students in grade 5 than for students in grade 6 ( t (159.94) = −2.11, p  = 0.04), and girls scored on average 8.89 points ( SE  = 1.34) higher than boys ( t (191.56) = 6.65, p  < 0.001). This final model explained 24% of the total variance in text quality scores between classes (R 2 2  = 0.24). The explained variance in text quality scores between students was 9% on the pretest, 26% on the first posttest and 11% for the second posttest.

Table 2 shows the estimated marginal means for the text quality scores for each condition and measurement occasion, adjusted for the other variables in the model. To verify the direction of the interaction effect between condition and measurement occasion, three specific contrasts were performed on the data. Results of the first contrast on the interaction effect showed that the writing performance of students in the intervention group improved more strongly between pretest and the first posttest compared to students in the control group ( t (188.14) = 4.10, p  < 0.001), with a significant increase in text quality of 17.79 points from pre- to posttest for students in the intervention group ( SE  = 1.54, p  < 0.001) and 9.17 points for students in the control group ( SE  = 1.43, p  < 0.001). The magnitude of this effect was estimated by comparing the effect of the intervention to the total amount of variance pooled over measurement occasion (Cohen’s d). This resulted in an estimated effect size in the intervention condition of 1.09, while generalizing over students and classes. These results show that students improved their writing performance in argumentative text between pre- and posttest (near-transfer; RQ1).

Results of the second contrast showed that improvements did not transfer to a different genre: text quality scores on the second posttest that measured far transfer effects were lower compared to text quality scores on the first posttest (same genre, near transfer; t (166.88) = − 2.43, p  < 0.05). This was the case for the students in the intervention group who scored 9.74 points lower at the second posttest ( SE  = 1.56, p  < 0.001), as well as for the students in the control group who scored 3.51 points lower at the second posttest ( SE  = 1.54, p  = 0.009). These results show that students did not transfer their improved writing performance to another genre (far transfer; RQ2).

There was, however, no complete decline in writing performance at the second posttest as was shown by the results of the third contrast. That is, the differences between the two conditions at the beginning of the intervention were no longer apparent at the second measurement occasion ( t (177.17) = 4.08, p  = 0.06). More specifically, whereas students in the control group scored 9.64 points higher at the pretest than students in the intervention condition ( SE  = 3.19, p  = 0.01), this difference decreased to 5.56 points at the second posttest which was a non-significant difference ( SE  = 3.28, p  = 0.11). Thus, particularly for students in the intervention group, some learning gains seem to have remained. Figure  1 illustrates the differences between conditions for the three different measurement occasions (pretest, near transfer, far transfer).

Differences in text quality scores between intervention group (green line) and control group (blue line) for the different measurement moments. Measurement occasion 1 is the pretest, measurement occasion 2 is the first posttest (same genre; near transfer) and measurement occasion 3 is the second posttest (other genre; far transfer). (color figure online)

Aptitude treatment interaction

As there were large differences between students at the pretest, we investigated in a separate analysis whether the effect of the intervention depended on students’ writing proficiency (RQ3). For this analysis, we estimated the regression of the pretest scores on the scores of the posttests, and its interaction with condition. For the first posttest (near transfer), it was shown that pretest scores significantly predicted scores at the posttest (β = 0.34, p  = 0.001), but there was no significant interaction effect of condition by text quality scores at pretest (β = 0.62, p  = 0.16). The results for the second posttest (far transfer) were comparable, with a significant regression of scores at pretest on posttest (β = 0.54, p  < 0.001), but again no significant interaction between pretest scores and condition (β =  − 0.18, p  = 0.69). These results show that students’ writing performance at the posttest is explained by their level of writing proficiency at the posttest, but that there is no interaction between condition and pretest scores.

Implementation fidelity and social validity of dialogic writing lessons in the classroom

We used the teacher logbooks and interviews to gain further insight into whether the intervention was implemented as intended (e.g., intervention enactment), how satisfied the teachers were with the intervention and what support teachers found particularly helpful as well as the things they struggled with (RQ4). Together, this provides us with information regarding intervention fidelity, and the internal and social validity of the dialogic writing intervention.

First, the logbooks and student products showed that most teachers completed all lessons, but in both the intervention and control group there were two classes who were not able to complete all the steps of the final two lessons in which they had to write a response to a letter. That the teachers were not able to complete this writing task was because they had to switch to homeschooling due to covid. Although they tried to finish the lessons at home, this turned out to be too challenging, especially regarding the final steps that included the peer dialogue and text revision.

Second, teachers indicated in the logbooks that the topic of sustainability was interesting for many students, but that they also found it a difficult topic to write about. It is therefore important to select a topic or theme that students want and can write about. Background information on the topic can help teachers select appropriate resources and examples for the first lesson. Furthermore, the interviews revealed that the design of the lesson series was slightly more difficult for teachers who are not used to working with themes in their schools. They indicated that they found it difficult to keep their students motivated to work on the same theme for eight weeks. According to them, the principles of dialogic writing (writing—talking—rewriting) are also suitable for shorter writing assignments on different topics.

Third, the logbooks revealed that in most classes the lessons took longer than estimated. On average, the lessons lasted 78 min, ranging from 45 to 120 min. The preparation time for teachers was 34 min per lesson, ranging from 15 to 75 min. The lesson duration was particularly longer for lesson 2, 4, 6, and 8 in which students engaged in conversation with each other and then had to rewrite their text, but teaching time was also longer for lesson 3 in which students had to use arguments from source texts to support their own point of view. In the interviews, teachers indicated that more time should be set aside for reading sources and selecting appropriate arguments to support one's own opinion. There was also one teacher who indicated that the planned 20 min writing time is too short for the students to finish one draft, even after 40 min of instruction and brainstorming for ideas.

Fourth, the interviews with teachers revealed that the most challenging step for students was to engage in a substantive dialogue about their own texts. Students appeared to find this very difficult, especially at the beginning of the lesson series. Teachers also indicated that they find it difficult to provide sufficient support in this process and that they would prefer to be present at every conversation to be able to adjust, but that this is not practically feasible. The teachers in the intervention group indicated that they benefited a lot from the training. They also argued that the conversational chart for students is essential, as it stimulates the students to deepen their conversations.

Finally, despite the challenge of encouraging good conversations in the classroom, all teachers reported that as the lesson series progressed and students practiced with the cycle of writing—talking—rewriting a few times, that they were becoming more critical of each other's texts in their conversations. Whereas at the beginning students had to get used to discussing the ideas in their texts with each other, by the end of the lessons the process of dialogic writing was well ingrained. The teachers indicated afterwards that most students were actively and seriously discussing and improving their texts. They were also especially enthusiastic about the final lessons in which they exchanged their letters with those from another school. Students really enjoyed reading others' letters and writing something back. Most teachers also indicated that they would like to continue implementing the principle of dialogic writing in writing instruction. Some have even already successfully applied it to other writing tasks outside of the planned intervention, for instance by writing invitations to parents for the final musical or writing poems (see Kooijman, 2022 ).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a dialogic writing intervention can improve students’ writing skills. Our research questions were: what are the effects of a dialogic writing intervention on students’ writing improvements in (a) argumentative writing between pre- and posttest (same genre; near transfer; RQ1), (b) instructional writing on the posttest (other genre; far transfer; RQ2). In addition, we studied whether (c) possible effects of the intervention on students’ writing performance at posttest can be explained by level of writing proficiency at pretest (RQ3). Finally, we investigated the fidelity and social validity of our intervention (RQ4). The results show a positive picture. That is, the dialogic writing intervention with additional support for students and teachers supports students to have dialogic conversations about each other's own written texts and revise their text accordingly. In these conversations, students ask each other more questions and give each other more feedback on the content of the texts. More importantly, the dialogic writing intervention has a positive effect on students' writing performance (ES = 1.09). After attending eight lessons, students write texts that are more persuasive and of higher quality. This is particularly true for the genre in which they practiced (i.e., argumentative writing; RQ1), and to a lesser extent for a new text genre (i.e., informative writing; RQ2). Furthermore, our results show that students’ posttest writing performance can be explained by their writing proficiency at the pretest, although our intervention did not affect this relation (RQ3). Finally, fidelity and social validity of our dialogic writing intervention were high (RQ4).

Based on this study, we can conclude that by taking a systematic approach to write, talk, and rewrite, students develop audience awareness, which over time leads to improved writing quality. Already with a little help and practice, students can have dialogic conversations about each other's texts. With this, we were able to successfully integrate the various language domains into a lesson series on the topic of sustainability. After all, students were not only writing texts, but they also read each other's texts and source texts for additional background information about their own text, and they talked about it with each other. Follow-up research should reveal whether and in what way a dialogic writing intervention also contributes to students' reading and speaking skills.

Limitations

A limitation of the current study is that only one text per genre was measured, making it difficult to generalize the effects to writing skills in general (Bouwer et al., 2015 ). In addition, the writing assignments were taken immediately after the lesson series, therefore it remains unclear whether there is also a long-term effect of the dialogic writing intervention. As a result, we can only show how students performed on these tasks immediately after the lessons. However, the topic of the pre- and post-measurement did differ from the topic that was the focus during the lessons. This does raise the expectation that after the lesson series, students will also score higher for text quality for other texts of a similar genre. Follow-up (longitudinal) research with more tasks and multiple measurement times is necessary to confirm this expectation.

Another limitation of the current study was the timing of the implementation of the lesson series. The second half of the lessons fell in the middle of a covid fall wave, requiring some classes to switch to homeschooling. Because it was necessary for the study to keep the moments of pre- and post-measurement the same in all classes, we chose to continue the lessons online. However, it proved to be difficult for teachers to properly supervise students' discussions and revisions online. Also, not all teachers managed to have all students write and rewrite all texts. This may have contributed to class differences in the effectiveness of the intervention. In addition, this observation highlights the importance of teacher support in having conversations about own texts. Finally, due the timing of the implementation a relatively large percentage of data (e.g., 25%) was missing on the far transfer posttest. Little’s MCAR test revealed that this data was missing at random. Besides, multilevel models are well equipped to deal with missing data (Snijders & Bosker, 2012 ).

Finally, follow-up research is needed on how students discussed and revised their texts during the lessons. While the results show that students’ writing quality improved over time, it is still unclear how this can be explained by the steps of writing, talking, and rewriting. This requires a more in-depth analysis of what aspects are specifically discussed in the peer conversations and how writers use these reader responses for revision. In the interviews with teachers after the intervention study they revealed that students did become more aware of the importance of having another person read and discuss their text, as they also applied this to new writing assignments independent of the intervention. This is hopeful since audience awareness is an important aspect of the writing process (Flower & Hayes, 1981 ; Graham, 2018 ). However, the teachers also noted that the final step of revision was difficult for students. They observed during the lessons that students by no means used all the feedback to revise their text. This observation is consistent with previous research by Bogaerds-Hazenberg et al. ( 2017 ), showing that the way feedback is formulated affects the use of it for revision. Future research should reveal how and when students use peer feedback for revision and what additional support, feedback, and instructions from teachers they need to do so more effectively.

Implications for educational practice

Based on the results of this intervention study, we can make some concrete recommendations for educational practice. First, the results confirm the effectiveness of dialogic writing in promoting students' writing performance. By reading and talking about their own texts, students write texts that are more persuasive to a reader. Teachers are therefore advised to encourage students to have small-group conversations after a first draft of the text using the conversation chart and then use this feedback to revise their text. Teachers have indicated that this structure of writing—talking—rewriting is easy to implement in the classroom. Also, over time, exchanging texts and discussing them becomes automatic for students. In this way, it becomes easier for students to see the connection between the different language skills of writing, reading, and speaking and to integrate them with each other in a meaningful way.

Second, the principles of dialogic writing can also be used for other text genres such as for writing poetry or an informative text. When selecting a writing assignment, teachers are advised to make sure that it is a meaningful task, for which good communication is essential. This makes talking about the texts easier.

Furthermore, several teachers indicated that good conversations do not just happen and that a basic level of dialogic conversation in the classroom is needed for these lessons to be successful. It is therefore recommended that sufficient attention is paid to the ground rules of dialogic classroom talk prior to the lessons, see Appendix 2 . Preferably, these ground rules should be established together with the students and repeated regularly as students begin to engage in conversations. It is also important that teachers themselves set a good example of dialogic conversations about texts. Therefore, teachers are advised to ask open and challenging questions about the texts and encourage students to complement each other and ask follow-up questions, rather than answering questions themselves or giving directive feedback on the texts.

Taken together, a dialogic writing intervention seems to be a promising approach to teach students how to talk about their texts and to write and rewrite texts that are more persuasive to readers. With this study, we not only sought to optimize interventions for learning to write and engage in conversations, but also to develop more generic knowledge about how to successfully integrate different language domains into classroom practice. In doing so, we hope to have contributed to an effective integration of the various language domains.

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This research was supported by grant 40.5.20500.176 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). We have no conflicts of interest to disclose. We thank all the teachers and teacher trainers who made this research possible.

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

Is this some kind of joke? A school facing shortages starts teaching standup comedy

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

Shots - Health News

Feeling artsy here's how making art helps your brain.

"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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Generative AI & Writing

Published May 21, 2024

A Kahn Institute Short-Term Project

Wednesday, Sept. 18, 12:15-1:10 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 19, 4:30-7:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 26, 4:30-7:30 p.m., and Friday, Sept. 27, 4:30-7:30 p.m.

Organizing Fellows

Julio Alves, Jacobson Center Director and English Language & Literature MJ Wraga, Psychology

Project Description

In an age where technology intersects with scholarship, creativity, and pedagogy, Generative AI promises intriguing possibilities for scholars, creative writers, and educators alike. Facilitated by Julio Alves, Jacobson Center, and MJ Wraga, psychology, co-directors of Smith’s Writing and Public Discourse initiative, this short-term Kahn seminar will delve into the intricacies of Generative AI and its particular applications in writing, fostering a dynamic dialogue on the fragile future of human-generated writing in literature, academia, and beyond. Guest speakers and AI experts Tim Laquintano of Lafayette College and Whitney Gegg-Harrison of the University of Rochester will enrich our conversation. Whether you're a seasoned CS? scholar or an inquisitive newcomer, join us for an enriching exploration of this cutting-edge technology and its potential impact on the world of writing and education. Mark your calendars and prepare for this timely, inspiring journey with us. We look forward to your presence and insightful contributions.

(This first draft of this invitation was composed by ChatGPT 3.5. Subsequent drafts were edited by human beings.)

Statements of interest are due Friday, June 7. Fellows will be notified no later than Friday, June 14.

How-To Geek

How chatgpt is helping me write a book.

ChatGPT can help with many things, including book writing. Here's how it's helping me plan and execute a book-writing plan.

Key Takeaways

• Writing with ChatGPT as a tool helps plot and create believable characters, but falls short on creativity.
• Combining The Hero's Journey and a step sheet helps outline chapters for a cohesive novel structure.
• Dialogue crafting with GPT enhances exchanges, providing fluidity and coherence in character interactions.

Most people get into writing because they have the dream that they're the creator of the next Great American Novel. I admit I'm one of those people. What happens when two of your hobbies, artificial intelligence tinkering and writing, overlap? You try to write a book using ChatGPT to help you, of course!

In the past, I've written a book or two , usually serialized as fiction on one social media platform or another. My folder of drafts on my cloud drive says that I have more ideas than time to finish them all. However, in this case, I have a plan, and I intend to follow through on it. The plan is thus:

• I want to write a complete novel (minimum 60,000 - 90,000 words)
• I want to have a completed first draft in ten weeks

This works out to writing around 10,000 words a week of fiction - not, by any stretch of the imagination, a simple task. But for me, that's quite doable. I can average around 2000 words of fiction in an hour's time (I type really quickly). The problem I have is with plot, continuity, and character development. So, I've decided to use GPT to help me complete my draft in 10 weeks. What better way to utilize an AI bot that has a history of thinking fiction is real ?

Step Sheets or How To Plot a Novel

Writers who don't get their ideas directly from ethereal beings are divided into two categories :

• Plotters: These have a plot outline, characters, and locations, so they can keep track of the story
• Pantsers: These write by the seat of their pants and go where their intuition takes them

For much of my early life as a writer, I was a Pantser, but I realized that being a Plotter is much better for seeing the end of a novel. Yet, even as a plotter, you have to make certain decisions about your plotting methodology. There are more than a handful of methods of plotting a good novel, and I settled on something called The Hero's Journey , a plotting methodology that reflects mythology.

Combining The Hero's Journey with something called a "step sheet" or "beat sheet," I can outline chapters and then fill them in. In the interest of avoiding spoilers (I actually want people reading my novel, after all), I'll skip the broad brush structure that GPT gave me for this novel plot. Instead, I'll give a glimpse of the first chapter's step-sheet:

Everything looks good so far!

Character Plotting: Breathing Life into Protagonists and Antagonists

In writing, there are several types of characters . Protagonists are the main characters or the ones the story follows. In my case, my protagonist is a young female detective who's just gotten a chance to prove herself. Antagonists are the people the protagonist is pitted against. In this case, I have one major antagonist (who I won't mention just yet) and a few supporting characters that could fall on either side of the conflict. However, when creating complex characters like these, I typically need a character outline. What better way to design a new character than asking GPT?

Character sketches can get complicated, and this one gives me a rundown on several character traits, including:

• Physical Description
• Tone of Voice
• Speech Pattern
• Relationship with other Characters

And a lot more! However, these are necessary since I'm going to ask GPT to role-play as these characters, and GPT needs those things to figure out how those characters would think and act. However, before GPT gets to role-play, we have to build the world in which the story is set.

Introducing Venus In The Near-Future

I generated the image above using a description provided by ChatGPT. Immediately, readers will realize that I'm writing a Sci-Fi novel. I've actually used GPT to generate things like background pictures and pictures of my protagonist and supporting characters, as well.

I'm not planning on including these in my final book, but since I'm posting a chapter a week on a free Patreon for people who are interested in keeping up with it, I'm using these as visual cues for my readers to have an idea of the places and people that I'm writing about.

That said, GPT is amazing at coming up with factions, interactions, and creating a believable world for these people to exist in. For example:

Dialogue Crafting: Bringing Characters to Life

One of the make-or-break elements of a novel is its dialogue. In the past, people have used GPT to practice languages conversationally , and this is just taking that to a new level. I've used ChatGPT to help me enhance that as well. For example, this is what one of the dialogue exchanges in my early chapters looks like:

I achieved this by asking GPT to role-play Autumn, and then taking the persona of Yoshida, as I understood him, to do the other side of the exchange. It seems like a very simple exchange, but it's fluid and there are no strange segues or tangents that might have otherwise affected my work. I'm quite happy with how this turned out.

Throughout the novel, I use GPT to help me come up with dialogue that's not only believable but fits the persona of the character. It's much easier talking to "someone" else than trying to come up with both sides of dialogue for a scene.

It's a Good Helper, But It's Terrible At Writing

ChatGPT is one of the best writing assistants I've ever had. It remembers things I forget, and it reminds me when things are not the way they should be. However, I and every other writer on the planet have something it doesn't - creativity. As an AI assistant, it can help me come up with ideas, plot factions, characters and even the whole novel. But it's rubbish at writing.

I asked it to pen a chapter for me, and it was painful to read. It had no idea about pacing, rushing through as much of the plot as it could get through in one chapter. It's great at efficiency. It's not so great with creativity. It might be able to give you a generic short story, but the longer the text, the more confused it gets - as if it needs its own AI assistant to help keep it straight.

All things considered, ChatGPT can speed up my writing because I have to spend less time plotting. So far I've completed nine chapters (around 32,000 words) of this novel and I intend to hit that 10-week window. For those that are interested in reading the work, you can check it out here (its free and chapters are released every Wednesday). You can judge for yourself whether ChatGPT is as good at plotting and narrative structure as a human. I think it's good for plotting, but writing remains the realm of the wordsmith.

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Research: Negotiating Is Unlikely to Jeopardize Your Job Offer

• Einav Hart,
• Julia Bear,
• Zhiying (Bella) Ren

A series of seven studies found that candidates have more power than they assume.

Job seekers worry about negotiating an offer for many reasons, including the worst-case scenario that the offer will be rescinded. Across a series of seven studies, researchers found that these fears are consistently exaggerated: Candidates think they are much more likely to jeopardize a deal than managers report they are. This fear can lead candidates to avoid negotiating altogether. The authors explore two reasons driving this fear and offer research-backed advice on how anxious candidates can approach job negotiations.

Imagine that you just received a job offer for a position you are excited about. Now what? You might consider negotiating for a higher salary, job flexibility, or other benefits , but you’re apprehensive. You can’t help thinking: What if I don’t get what I ask for? Or, in the worst-case scenario, what if the hiring manager decides to withdraw the offer?

• Einav Hart is an assistant professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, and a visiting scholar at the Wharton School. Her research interests include conflict management, negotiations, and organizational behavior.
• Julia Bear is a professor of organizational behavior at the College of Business at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her research interests include the influence of gender on negotiation, as well as understanding gender gaps in organizations more broadly.
• Zhiying (Bella) Ren is a doctoral student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on conversational dynamics in organizations and negotiations.

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How important is research for bs/md programs.

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Direct medical programs, often referred to as BS/MD programs, are some of the most competitive programs in the country. With programs at Baylor University, Brown University and Case Western Reserve University accepting less than 3% of all its applicants, these programs are often more competitive than the Ivy League. They are looking for exceptional students who are completely committed to becoming physicians. That means the students have spent the better part of their high school career pursuing STEM-focused activities, including physician shadowing, volunteering in healthcare settings and leadership positions in clubs.

Many BS/MD hopefuls pursue research as a way to build their resume.

Numerous BS/MD programs like Rensselaer Polytechnic University, like to see students with extensive research experience. Its program, aptly named the Physician-Scientist Program, wants to see students who will not only participate in research during their tenure in the program but also lead and create their own research projects. The University of South Carolina’s Accelerated Undergraduate to M.D. program has an extensive research and thesis component that is required throughout the student’s academic career. The University of Rochester offers funding for summer research for its BS/MD students. Similarly, the University of Illinois at Chicago looks for students who can demonstrate their “research aptitude.”

What Type Of Research Do BS/MD Programs Accept?

High school students have access to a wide array of research opportunities. School-related options could include science fair projects or AP Seminar and AP Research. Students might also choose to pursue camps or programs over the summer, which allows them to dedicate more time to research. Other students find independent research projects with a local professor. Alternatively, others opt to write a literature review paper to get published.

When BS/MD admission officers review applications, they don’t pit one type of experience against another. They know not every student will be able to find a local professor who allows them to research with them or can afford to do a paid summer program that spans numerous weeks or months. Consequently, they typically will consider holistically the depth of a student’s research experience, irrespective of the type of research the student completes.

Virtual Or In-Person Programs?

Both virtual and in-person experiences can add value to a BS/MD application. However, it depends on the program’s learning objectives and deliverables. Some students don’t have the flexibility to travel to an in-person camp and spend multiple weeks or months there. The University of Pittsburgh’s Guaranteed Admission Program says that “while in-person experiences are encouraged, virtual or remote experiences will be considered when evaluating the applicant.” For those students who have other obligations, a virtual camp might be the perfect fit and still offer a valuable experience.

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Top ceo bets on a shock biden crypto flip as congress hurtles toward a crucial vote that could blow up the price of bitcoin ethereum and xrp, iphone 16 pro max all-new design upgrade promised, insider claims, does the research topic matter.

The research experience doesn’t necessarily have to align with the student’s research interests, but it can often be helpful if it does. However, BS/MD admission officers know that high school students are still exploring their interests, which will likely evolve over the years. An opportunity that doesn’t align with the student’s interest will still be valuable because it allows the student to gain valuable skills that they can leverage to other research experiences in the future.

Summer programs might give students a chance to explore dual interests. Some students interested in medicine might also want to explore computer science or Artificial Intelligence, so finding an opportunity that allows them to blend those interests might be ideal. For example, Rising Researchers , a sister company of Moon Prep, is hosting two five-week summer camps that allow students to practice AI and Machine Learning to study human diseases. Other camps, like Penn Summer Academies, allow students to apply coding skills to other areas of study.

How Long Should The Research Experience Be?

The typical length of a research experience, especially one in the summer, can vary from as short as one week to up to eight weeks. A longer research experience can give students a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter and, importantly, the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with their mentor and fellow students. However, the duration is not the sole determinant of a meaningful experience. Students should also look to see what the tangible outcomes of the program, such as a research paper, skills gained, letter of recommendation and more.

For students who find an independent research experience, the relationship might span several months or even years. Those experiences might result in more fruitful research results and a strong relationship between the student and the mentor.

Are Publications Required?

An experience resulting in a research publication is an added bonus, but it isn’t a requirement. If a student writes a research paper, even if not published, can still demonstrate the student’s scientific writing ability and add value to their college application.

Every BS/MD program is different, and the admission officers' value of research might vary from program to program. Ultimately, BS/MD programs are looking for students who are passionate about medicine and have had extensive experiences to affirm that passion. The College of New Jersey stated in an interview with Moon Prep that they are looking for passionate students, be it a deep involvement in Boy Scouts, Taekwondo or music. Therefore, students should never feel obligated to research if it does not align with their interests. Being genuine in their activities and demonstrating their passions is how to build a resume that stands out to BS/MD admission officers.

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