![]() ![]() ![]() (Just to be clear, spoken language allows this as well, we just rarely avail ourselves of them when reporting speech verbally.) “Then the judge said to me, ‘You are hereby remanded to state custody for a term of no less than ninety days for the egregious overuse of the words fraught and curated.’ And I was all like, ‘How can I possibly keep my self-help-slash-boutique-spice blog going without those words?’”īut the written word allows us the use of many, many more dialogue tags: exclaimed, answered, yelled, spoke, stated, replied, questioned, shouted, gibbered, opined, etc. Said is used by almost everyone like is largely limited to people who were born after 1970 (or 1965, or maybe 1960 this isn’t an exercise in linguistic demography). In the everyday speech of most people, we really only use a couple of dialogue tags when discussing direct discourse: said and like. How dialogue is set off from the rest of the narrative is one of those little things that makes a big difference in how your story reads and what the reader understands about you, including:Īre you a Serious Author, an author of genre fiction, or a clueless dilettante? ![]() Today’s post is by editor Christopher Hoffmann from Copy Write Consultants ( are so many moving parts an author needs to pay attention to when writing fiction-POV, character development, narrative structure, happy-hour specials-that it’s easy to miss the small stuff, the things that we think we instinctively understand and already do very well. Photo credit: Marc Wathieu on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC ![]()
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