"Dialogue!" she exclaimed.

       "View this slide show for a refresher on how to punctuate and write dialogue," Ms. Taylor told the exhausted class.
       Holden sighed and put his head down on his desk. "I've never gotten this whole dialogue-punctation thing," he whined. "Why, Ms. Taylor, why? Why do we have to learn this?"
       Ms. Taylor smiled at Holden and the rest of the class. "Someday, Holden," she said gently, "you or someone else in this class will be a famous author--probably Isaac. He's very adept at writing fiction." She looked directly at Isaac. "Or Marissa may write a memoir filled with wonderful similes. Reading her memoir is like finding the marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms."
     "That's a horrible simile, Ms. Taylor," Archie exclaimed. "Can't you come up with anything better?"
     "It's pretty bad," Mattie whispered to Bryce, who stifled a laugh.
     "Enough!" Ms. Taylor yelled. "This isn't a lesson on figurative language. This is about dialogue! You had better write some excellent dialogue in your memoirs."
 

Punctuating Quotations and Writing Dialogue in Narrative Writing from jfreisen