B. He said/she said... Don’t try too hard with dialogue tags!
It is a common concept that ‘said’ is too plain and simple, and needs to be replaced with better, bigger words... But! If you get too adventurous with your dialogue tags, using a different synonym for ‘said’ every time you use a tag, attention draws towards that fact and away from your amazing dialogue. So never underestimate the effectiveness of ‘said’!
However, sometimes you do need to vary from using ‘said’ to avoid repetition, just don’t try too hard as it will stick out like a sore thumb in your writing: you want all the attention centred on your dialogue, not on your amazing vocabulary. Readers don’t always pay all that much attention to the dialogue tags anyway, but using bold words which included obvious effort to come up with, such as ‘interjected’ or ‘advocated’, will draw their attention to them and pull them out of the action and dialogue! Remember, the whole point of even using dialogue tags (i.e. ‘he said/she said’) is so the reader can tell who it is that is saying what, so there’s no need to go out of your way to come up with lots of amazing words. Focus your extensive vocabulary in the descriptions instead! You can also avoid the whole dialogue tag situation by breaking up speech with action:
“What are you doing?” Terry narrowed her eyes and pointed her finger accusingly at Tom who cowered in the corner. “Is that my pet hamster?”
Or sometimes there is no need for dialogue tags at all when it is obvious who’s saying what:
“Hello there, what is your name?” Rosie asked, smiling kindly at the small girl.
“Isobel.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you.”(
Although it does get a little tedious, and in need of some action/description to break it up somewhat, don’t you think?
)Discussion 3: What are some effective ways of trying to avoid the use of too many dialogue tags? Also, how many different synonyms for ‘said’ do you actually know that don’t show some obvious effort for the times when they are needed?