I’m a “grammar nazi”, and I know it. It takes all my self control not to correct people. Sometimes I can’t help it and I correct them anyway.

But today, I actually want to talk about something I’m somewhat confused about: sentence structure.

Sometimes, I’ll see dialogue or a quote written like this:

“Politics is really complicated, said Molly”

And I’ll think to myself: Shouldn’t it be “Molly said“?

Or I’ll see this in a lot of news articles that I read:

“The president on Monday tweeted …”

And my brain will start automatically correcting it to: “On Monday, the president tweeted …”

So, my question is this: Which version of the two examples above is correct? Why? Or is it simply a matter of preference?