What Does CONT'D Mean in a Screenplay? (CONT'D) Explained

What CONT'D means in a screenplay

(CONT'D) is short for continued. It sits after a character name, on the character cue line, and it means one thing: this character was already talking, something got in the way on the page, and now they are talking again. The audience never hears it. It exists for the reader, so a producer skimming at speed does not think a new speaker has entered.

INT. NORTH POINT LIGHTHOUSE - NIGHT

Mara checks the lamp. Dead.

                      MARA
            It was working an hour ago.

She taps the glass. Nothing.

                      MARA (CONT'D)
            Ben. Did you touch this?

Without the (CONT'D), the second cue reads as if a new beat of conversation has begun, or as if a line from someone else went missing. With it, the reader knows the action line was a pause, not a hand-off. That is the whole job of the mark, and it is why the convention survives even though it adds nothing to the film.

You will see it written as (CONT'D) in almost every professional draft. (CONTINUED) and (cont'd) both turn up in older scripts, but the capitalised, apostrophised, abbreviated form is what current software produces and what readers expect. The parentheses are part of it: MARA CONT'D without them looks like a typo.

The two uses: continuing over action, and continuing over a page break

There are exactly two situations that call for (CONT'D), and they look different on the page.

1. Dialogue interrupted by action

A character speaks, an action line describes something, and the same character speaks again with nobody else having said a word. The second cue takes (CONT'D). This is the everyday use and the one you will see dozens of times in any feature. It does not matter how long the action line is; one line or five, if the same person speaks on either side of it, the second cue is continued.

2. Dialogue split by a page break

When a speech runs off the bottom of a page, the page ends with (MORE) under the last line of dialogue, and the next page opens with the character cue again, marked (CONT'D):

                      BEN
            I didn't touch anything. I came up
            the stairs, I saw the lamp was out,
            and I called you. That's the whole
                      (MORE)


                      BEN (CONT'D)
            story. Ask the keeper if you don't
            believe me.

(MORE) is centred under the dialogue at the dialogue margin, and (CONT'D) goes on the cue at the top of the new page. In practice you never place either one by hand. Pagination changes every time you edit a line above it, and any mark you typed would end up in the middle of a page within a day. Standard dialogue formatting leaves both to the software.

CONT'D vs CONTINUOUS: not the same thing

New writers mix these up because they share a root. They live on different lines and mean different things.

INT. LIGHTHOUSE STAIRS - NIGHT

Mara takes the steps two at a time.

INT. LAMP ROOM - CONTINUOUS

She bursts in. Ben is already there.

                      MARA
            You said you'd wait downstairs.

He holds up the fuse.

                      MARA (CONT'D)
            Oh.

Both appear in that excerpt and neither could replace the other. The scene heading uses CONTINUOUS because the stairs and the lamp room are one unbroken movement. The cue uses (CONT'D) because Mara's line was interrupted by Ben's fuse. The third row of the table, page-level CONTINUED:, belongs to shooting scripts and should be switched off in anything you send out on spec.

Should you type CONT'D yourself?

No. Every serious screenwriting app, from Final Draft to free tools, adds the dialogue (CONT'D) when it detects the same character speaking twice in a row, and adds (MORE) and the page-top (CONT'D) when it paginates. Zen Writer does this as you type and keeps it correct as the text moves, on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. If you type the mark by hand in an app that also generates it, you get MARA (CONT'D) (CONT'D), which readers see more often than you would think.

There are three situations where you make a decision rather than let the software run:

• Extensions. When a cue already carries (V.O.) or (O.S.), the continued mark follows it: MARA (V.O.) (CONT'D). The voice-over extension comes first because it describes the voice, and the continuation describes the page.
• Turning it off. Some writers switch the dialogue (CONT'D) off entirely on the grounds that the action line makes the continuation obvious. This is a legitimate choice for a spec, though the default among readers is still to expect it. Whichever you pick, apply it to the whole script.
• Plain-text drafts. If you write in Fountain or a plain text editor, the mark is generated at export. Do not put it in the source text. Paste a draft into the free screenplay formatter and it will produce the cues correctly in the PDF.

If you already have a draft with hand-typed continueds, open it in the free online screenplay editor, remove the typed ones, and let the app regenerate them. It is faster than hunting for doubles.

CONT'D with parentheticals, V.O. and phone calls

The mark interacts with a few other elements, and the ordering is fixed.

Parentheticals. A parenthetical goes on its own line under the cue, so it never competes with (CONT'D). MARA (CONT'D) on the cue line, (quietly) on the next, dialogue under that.

Off-screen lines. A character who steps out of the room and keeps talking changes extension, not continuation. MARA becomes MARA (O.S.), and if she was already mid-speech the cue reads MARA (O.S.) (CONT'D). The O.S. extension describes where the voice comes from; it does not reset the count.

Phone calls. In an intercut call, the two speakers alternate, so (CONT'D) only appears when one of them speaks twice around an action line, exactly as in a face-to-face scene. It does not mark the fact that the call is still going.

Dual dialogue. Two characters speaking at once are formatted side by side, and continuation applies to each column independently.

Common CONT'D mistakes

1. Doubling it. (CONT'D) (CONT'D) from typing a mark the software also adds. Search the script for the string before you send it; Zen Writer's full-script search finds every instance in one pass.
2. Adding it after another character speaks. If Ben says a line between Mara's two speeches, Mara's second cue is not continued. Someone else spoke; the thread was broken.
3. Using it to mean the scene continues. That is what CONTINUOUS in the slugline is for. (CONT'D) only ever follows a character name.
4. Leaving shooting-script CONTINUED: on a spec. Page-top and page-bottom continueds mark a production draft. A reader notices them on page one.
5. Hand-placing (MORE). It will drift the moment you edit anything above it. Let pagination place it.
6. Inconsistency. Half the script with continueds, half without, usually because two drafts were merged from different apps. Pick one behaviour and run the whole script through it.

The free spec script checker flags CONT'D marks alongside camera directions and missing times of day, so you can see in one pass whether your draft reads as a spec. For a page that shows every element in its correct position, see the screenplay formatting examples in the formatting hub.

Frequently asked questions

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