![]() People hardly ever speak without doing something else. These are just brief descriptions of motion, and the best thing is that they can punctuate dialogue, show who is speaking, and add a bit of imagery to the speech. 'And what are these action beats?' you ask. Doing so immediately turns that 'tag' into an action beat. Heck, you could even give it a shot! If the answer is no, then it's best to replace that comma with a full-stop. If you feel tempted to use action as a speech tag, first ask yourself if it is possible to speak the way the action implies. So, something like this: Dad laughed, "How is that possible?" Yes, you could intersperse your laughter with speech and vice versa, but you can't laugh out a word. It is physically impossible to laugh and speak at the same time. Remember that speech tags should only ever describe the dialogue itself, and not the character. One common error authors make is using a character's actions as a dialogue tag. That would only weigh down the writing and dilute the effects of the dialogue, and those are not effects you'd look forward to.Īctions cannot serve as dialogue tags. One major use of the tag is to show who is speaking, right? So if you have a back-and-forth between two characters, and you've already established who and who is in the scene, you can spare yourself the repeated mentions of "X said" and "Y said". If you've ever felt like your use of dialogue tags became excessive, then you might be relieved to know this. ![]() The longer we hesitate, the less energy we'll have to do anything later." We have two sick people with us, and more might succumb to illness if we remain. "The water we have will only last us three days, and that's if we ration it strictly. As always, here's an example, albeit a short one, to illustrate: "How long do you think we can stay like this?" Emmanuel asked. Speaking of lengthy speech, if your dialogue exceeds one paragraph, the ending quotation of the first paragraph should be omitted, while the opening quotation for the second paragraph remains. "Don't worry," Mason said, "we have a stash somewhere in the kitchen." Here are some examples with the tags in different spots: She said, "Alex was supposed to bring the snacks." "Alex was supposed to bring the snacks," she said. However, if the reader is going to come across a long stretch of dialogue or lengthy speech from a character, it's a good idea to place the tag as close as possible to the beginning, so the readers can know right away who's speaking. There's no specific rule regarding where to place your dialogue tags in different situations. It's easy to make an error regarding this due to the auto-correct feature in word processors.ĭialogue tags can appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. You can see from the examples above that even when the tag followed a question or exclamation mark, it remained in lowercase. ![]() In addition, because a dialogue tag is not a complete sentence, it cannot begin with a capital letter unless it is placed at the beginning of a sentence (i.e., before the speech comes along). "Don't track mud into the house," Mom said. "Stop right there!" yelled the police officer. I'll give a few examples to illustrate: Adam said, "I won't let them escape." "Where are you going?" asked Chisom. except when the dialogue makes use of a question mark or the exclamation mark. Lest I go on a spiel about my love for using 'said' and 'asked', let's look at some basic guidelines for using the dialogue tag:ĭialogue tags are always accompanied by commas. I believe these tags work best when they are invisible to the eye, because that means the reader can remain completely immersed in your book world. Of course, you can find even more colourful tags in the wild, but I'm an advocate for the use of plain and basic dialogue tags in writing. The basic dialogue tags are said and asked, but there are more descriptive words like yelled, murmured, and whispered, which can paint a more vibrant picture for the reader. So today, I will be focusing on the things that accompany dialogue-dialogue tags.ĭialogue tags are simply words that describe how words are spoken and identify who is doing the speaking. There's so much dialogue can do that an entire book can be written on this topic alone. It can reveal the inner workings of your characters' minds. It can reveal information beneath the surface. It can reveal information on the surface. Dialogue is one of my favorite things to do in writing.
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