There are many reasons that modern languages have punctuation. Latin is the only language I know of to lack spacing and punctuation, and that's because the words tell you which other words they modify. Also, Latin is hard to read when all the words are run together.

This probably wasn't helpful at all, but I tried.

*points at hS* What he said. :P

...dialogue punctuation is necessary. In fact, I have recently been charging heavily for a lack of it in my current missions.

Poor Cyba and Eagrus are getting sick of comma-storms...

I'm pretty sure I was always taught that dialogue needed punctuation (my last actual English lesson was over 10 years ago now, so there is some stuff I'm genuinely uncertain about).

I've certainly noticed that trend in badfic, though I'd never gone as far as checking the nationality of the authors to see if there was a pattern.

Taking a random sample of all of the British authors I've got books for on my bookshelves shows that they all use punctuation to end their dialogue each time.

In Italian we use a different type of marking for dialogue (hipens instead of quotation marks), but we still use full punctuation, so I'm afraid that whoever said they could be dropped has a low grasp of actual grammar.

... well, you already know. :P I've never heard any reasonable person say you can drop it - just badfic writers.

hS