Today I'm going to be talking to you about dialogue tags. This will be a relatively short chapter as there isn't all that much to talk about, but nonetheless, it is still good to know when you are writing dialogue.

First of all, what's a dialogue tag?

A dialogue tag is the words that come after dialogue. Specifically, it is to show who said what was said and also, how they said it.

Example: John whispered.

Now, the "effective" use of dialogue tags has been mislead by multiple people countless times, particularly by elementary school teachers. You may have heard the saying that "said is dead". If you have, you also might have wondered why, if said is dead, hundreds of authors use it all the time in their writing.

The reason is quite simple. And said, on the contrary, is certainly not dead. Dialogue tags are distracting. They interrupt the flow of a piece of literature and authors like the conversations in their novels to run smoothly at a reasonable pace. The thing is, readers have seen the word "said" so many times, that we basically cancel it out in our brains so when we are reading along, it's almost as if the dialogue tag isn't even there. Therefore, the flow is not interrupted.

Many times, you don't even need to have a dialogue tag. So long as you can tell who is speaking, you don't have to include one at all. This being said, you should make sure to include some more than once in a long conversation or the readers may start to get confused. But really, sometimes no dialogue tags are the best way to go.

None of this is to say that you can only use said or nothing at all; in fact, you probably should use other words once in awhile because the same word over and over can become quite tedious. But you don't need to think of elaborate words. I would suggest only using other words to show that a tone of voice has changed or to specify how they are speaking when it is appropriate, like the words "whisper", "yell", "shriek", etc.

Another way you can switch things up is to have an action in place of a dialogue tag, which I'm sure you've done before.

Example: "So tell me." Cameron sat down and folded his hands in his lap. "How did you know about my plan?"

That's it for this chapter! I hope that this cleared up your questions about dialogue tags and maybe now that you've read this you will start using said instead of fifty different words that mean the same thing. Thanks for reading!