To continue my series on self-editing tips, I’m turning my attention today to dialogue and the tags we use to identify the speakers in a conversation.
This step may be combined with others during the sentence-by-sentence editing read because it addresses only these three mechanics of labeling dialogue:
When dialogue is carried on between two people, use the dialogue tag only as often as needed to let the reader know who is speaking.
“You know what I mean?” said Marjorie. She waited for her brother to answer.
“No.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course, you do.”
When the dialogue involves more than two people, add a dialogue tag each time the speaker changes, or use a leading sentence before the dialogue to identify the speaker.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Marjorie said.
Or,
Marjorie raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
Use said as your dialogue tag, with perhaps an occasional asked or repeated.
Other words that describe speech such as hollered, yelled, whispered, mumbled, and shrieked might be used once in a great while, but it’s best if the dialogue and narrative show the speaker’s behavior and tone, rather than the author telling us. Avoid verbs that introduce actions other than speech. Examples are coughed, spat, choked, and lied.
As in most other editing tasks, the aim is to avoid pulling the reader out the story with unusual phrasing or word choices. Using a dialogue tag to convey information the reader wouldn’t otherwise know (the speaker is lying, for example), or that the reader already knows (the speaker is lying, for example), is distracting.
If you missed the earlier self-editing tips, they are:
How to Identify Dragging Narrative
Finding and Breaking Your Habits
Weeding Out Adjectives and Adverbs
More from my site
Self-Editing One Step at a Time: Weeding Out Adjectives and Adverbs
Self-Editing: Finding and Breaking Your Habits
Self-Editing One Step at a Time: How to Identify Dragging Narrative
Writing a Trilogy … by Yolanda Renée
One Writer’s Tools … by Bailey Cates
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Good advice. I use “said” most of the time, and also use leading sentences. I do dislike reading long pages of dialogue where I have trouble figuring out who is speaking.
Hi Janet! That’s a good reason to break up the dialogue now and then with a little narrative. Just a little.
What a great balance, here, between avoiding wordiness and ‘clutter,’ on the one hand, and making sure the reader can follow the story, on the other. I think both are important, and it’s not always easy to strike that balance. Thanks, Pat.
I tend to use not enough “clutter” sometimes, Margot — even when only two people are in the room talking to each other, I can still lose the reader in the back and forth.
People don’t growl like animals but they growl like people. I just couldn’t pass that up. We call it that in my part of the country. I hate it when I have to backtrack when I’m reading because I lost track of who was speaking because of lack of dialogue tags.
LOL — Susan, I need to visit your part of the country to hear one of your good residents growling. After that, I’ll give in and take “growled” off my bad dialogue tag list.
I remember one editor stating that people positively do not growl like animals. LOL Although sometimes, they do. Just not as a dialogue tag.
Diane, I think growled shows up a lot in Westerns. Maybe they used to do more of that in the old days. 😀
I used to use more tags than I needed, especially beyond ‘said.’ Much better now!
Good morning, Alex. Most writers do that when they first start writing, but a good editor helps us break the habit. I find a lot of crazy tags such as “lied” when I do critiques.