A Brief Guide to Dialog Tags

Part of being an aspiring writer is receiving feedback, and a big part of getting feedback is giving it. I've belonged to several critique sites over the years, including but not limited to deviantART (which, while a good site, leaves much to be desired if your goal is useful feedback on lengthly prose), Critique Circle (which is a great site, but I started to have trouble keeping up with the queue), and Scribophile (which is useful, but unfortunately much of the useful bits for novel-writers require that you sign up for the premium membership).

However, the point of this post isn't to analyze the various websites out there, but rather to emphasize a piece of common advice I've found myself giving lately. It's about something that should be simple, but isn't: dialog tags.

Something that should really be as easy as she said gives a lot of people trouble, sometimes because they don't understand the nature of the dialog tag, and sometimes because they try too hard. There are a couple of common mistakes that, while technically grammatically correct, should be avoided by anyone who wants their work taken seriously.

While technically "wrylies" is a bit of screenwriting jargon referring to parentheticals in a script, it's the one that's stuck with me over the years. They're also called "Tom Swifties," but I prefer the screenwriting term. An example is:

Jim: (wheezing) He said what?

Used in excess, they become annoying. This is true in prose as well, though we usually see them in this format:

"Things are good," she said happily.

A more technical label for these is "adverbial dialog tags," and they're a problem for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that they're indicative of weak writing. If your dialog is already strong, i.e. your diction properly demonstrates (read: shows) the mood, then you don't need to give me an extraneous explanation (read: tell). For example:

"Get out of my house, you rat!"

I could attach she said angrily to the end of that, but between her language, the exclamation point, and the context (for example, if the antagonist had just told her that he had cheated on her), her anger should already be clear.

Sometimes, you can't avoid the wryly. If it's a choice of being unclear or shoving the adverb in there, then of course you should go with the adverb. But first, instead of attaching an -ly to clarify your point, try a piece of action. Let us see your protagonist stomp her foot or throw a pot at his head.

Then there are the people who avoid "said" altogether. Unfortunately, readers are trained to ignore words like "said" and "asked," which makes their reading go faster and lets them slip into the conversation. When an author goes and gets bored with "said" and try to spice things up with (melo)dramatic terms--whispered, bawled, hollered--it does little except distract and annoy the reader.

Another phrase for these is "said bookisms." It's okay to have a few, but it's better if you avoid the really extreme ones, like "she shrieked" or "he snarled."

Even worse, of course, are the ones that just don't make sense, or are physically impossible like:

"Shut up," he hissed.

Sit down and try to hiss that phrase. How well does that work out for you? Find a longer phrase, hiss it to someone. Do they understand you? How well do the sibilants come through? Think about it. Or how about this one:

"You're hilarious," he laughed.

If you're laughing, can you also talk? Start laughing and try to form a coherent sentence.

It's fine if you want to indicate that your character is amused in that moment. They can even laugh, but it must be punctuated properly. The appropriate dialog tag is not "he laughed" in that situation; "he laughed" should be written as an action:

"You're hilarious." He laughed.

And as a final note, just to reinforce the very basic rules of punctuating dialog:

"This is proper," he said.
"This is not." He said
"This is wrong too," he smirked.
"However, this is acceptable." He smirked.

There are other, more advanced, rules and guidelines about dialog tags, but I won't go into them here. I hope this helps.