"It is!" I squealed at the same time she cried, "It's not!" - Is this sentence correct? [closed]
Solution 1:
It is correct. Perhaps you're concerned that it's a run-on sentence, but it's saved by an implied "that": "'It is!' I squealed at the same time [that] she cried, 'It's not!'". Meaning that the core of the sentence is "I squealed," and "at the same time she cried" is a dependent clause. You could also recast the sentence as two independent clauses: "'It is!'" I squealed; at the same time she cried, 'It's not!'". You might also be concerned about punctuation in sentences containing direct quotes. The exclamation mark in "It is!" stands in for a comma.