So, I sometimes have trouble writing dialogue in a way that makes people read it in the way that I want it to be read (like with the right tones and inflections and what not). For example, in a short story I did for creative writing class, I tried to write a character’s dialogue in one scene in a way to indicate that she was crying while speaking. To do this, I used a lot of dashes and ellipses to try and show pauses in speech, like when you take breaths when you cry, but people seemed to read it more as stuttering in fear. I got a lot of comments about how people don’t really stutter like that when they’re scared, so that was apparently not how to write crying dialogue. Does anyone know how to do this?

Another example would be to show that someone is angry or kind of yelling without using a tone of exclamation points of CAPSRAGE. I use italics a lot for this, but people don’t always pick up on why the italics are there.

So, yeah, this is just in general, how do you show how a character is saying a specific line so that the reader knows what it’s supposed to sound like?

In my opinion, it’s often more about the words used around the dialogue, and then it’s up to the reader to interpret the words and dialogue- hopefully the same way as you wrote them.

I’ve tried this before, and I think that’s what I’m going to try to do when I revise, to make what’s going on more clear. Showing pauses in dialogue without it looking awkward is something else I need to figure out.

To do this, I used a lot of dashes and ellipses to try and show pauses in speech, like when you take breaths when you cry

That makes sense to me. Of course, it depends on context.

Dialogue and descriptive tags are your best friend. If you want to show pauses or really emphasize how a character says something, they’re the best way to go, and they’re far less annoying/ambiguous than ellipses/dash/italics abuse. And tags don’t always have to describe the dialogue directly or even be placed at the start/end of each line of dialogue.

For an impromptu example:

After a certain point, though, you have to realize that readers will read and interpret the dialogue as they will, and there is nothing you can do about it. There comes a point where you’ll try too hard, which will make for clunky, unpleasant and unrealistic to read dialogue.

The best you can do is hint at the intended tones of voice through tags and gestures, but if you’ve written your characters well enough and have ensured that their dialogue is consistent throughout the piece, your readers will be quite capable of filling in the blanks on their own.

The old adage “actions speak louder than words” is very much true.

You have to be careful with “...” and “!” and any other kind of textual effect, because the reader can rapidly get annoyed with you if you overuse them. I agree with Kyllorac’s advice here.

Or, you know, you could always just rely on being able to sprinkle adjectives all over the place whenever you wish. ‘Traitor tears were there betraying me…’ So now the idiot reader knows for sure that she’s crying against her will.

No one’s ever going to read dialogue the way the writer intended it, which is why you I agree with the general consensus here—you should just use speechtags and other descriptive bits to prod them in the right direction. Launching into straight up dialogue for emotion is tough.

I don’t know about crying, because people cry for a lot of reasons, but for anger, say, what the character is saying in addition to the way what they’re saying is written should both give clues to how they’re saying it. Its tough with others, but anger has a habit of seriously limiting one’s vocabulary. Kyllorac’s example (which cracked me up by the way, I love the way Tom reacts) shows that really well.