Paste your dialogue and see exactly where the punctuation slips: a period where a comma belongs before a speech tag, a capital letter on a tag that should be lowercase, a comma stranded outside the quotation mark, an action beat glued to a line with a comma. Switch between the US double-quote and UK single-quote conventions. Every check is deterministic and runs on your device.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, sent anywhere or stored. Switch the convention above to check British single-quote dialogue instead of American double-quote dialogue.
Your text never leaves this page. The checks run entirely in your browser: no upload, no server, no storage, no AI reading your work.
Paste "Hello." she said. and the checker flags it immediately. When a line of dialogue runs straight into a speech tag like she said, the sentence does not end at the quotation mark: the tag is part of it. So the mark inside the quote is acomma, not a period, and the tag beginslowercase. This output is generated at build time by the same code that runs in your browser:
Error: period before tag
A statement that runs into a dialogue tag ("said") ends with a comma, not a period, inside the quotation mark.
Fix: Change the period to a comma: …," she …
Correct: “Hello,” she said.
Comma or period before a tag. A quotation that runs into a speech tag (said, asked, whispered) ends with a comma inside the mark. A period there closes the sentence too early; a missing mark leaves the tag hanging.
Capitalisation after the tag. Because the tag is part of the dialogue sentence, he, she and said stay lowercase after the comma. Names andI keep their capital.
Action beats. An action is not speech. "I know," she smiledis a comma splice: you cannot smile a sentence. The line ends with a period, and the action is its own sentence: "I know." She smiled.
Mark placement and convention. In US style, periods and commas go inside the closing quotation mark. Choose the US convention for double quotes with single quotes nested inside, or the UK convention for single quotes with double quotes nested inside; the checker flags dialogue wrapped in the wrong outer mark for the convention you picked.
Opening capital. Dialogue that starts a new sentence begins with a capital letter.
| US (Chicago / AP) | UK (Oxford) | |
|---|---|---|
| Outer dialogue mark | Double: “…” | Single: ‘…’ |
| Quote inside a quote | Single: ‘…’ | Double: “…” |
| Comma before a tag | Inside the mark | Inside the mark (in fiction) |
The comma-and-period rules for speech tags are the same on both sides of the Atlantic in fiction; the visible difference is the shape of the marks. The checker enforces exactly that, and nothing academic beyond it.
An AI reader gives you a different verdict every time you ask, and it can quietly rewrite your voice while it is at it. This checker is the opposite: fixed rules, drawn from the Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook and British publishing practice, all listed in the site repository. Run the same passage twice and you get the same flags. It never rewrites your dialogue; it points at the punctuation and tells you the rule, and you decide.
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