Said, said, said, said

Never use adjectives before said, but feel free to spice up your 'said's as with the mood.

yelled
barked
whimpered
gasped
roared
cried
giggled
laughed
whispered
shouted

All of each of these has their different emotions and reasons for using them. If a character is crying, you want to show that with using cried or whimpering before dialog. If they are angry, you can use roared or shouted. Each word is a different way of saying something. Never go out of your way to come up with crazy versions of said or foreign words that will distract the reader!

Said is best reserved for common dialog which no particular emotion is strongly affecting a character. Miffed or crest fallen, emotionless or tense, the best word for these inbetween emotions is 'said'.

Said, replied, asked, laughed, and cried. Maybe one or two more, but that's really all you need.

Too much said is annoying, but the readers should be focused on what's actually being said, not the tags. If you start using all the other words your teachers want you to use, it becomes more about them and it will distract those of us with ADD.

A good way to avoid using said is by using actions. For example, " 'Chocolate is very good for you.' Jane picked up her piece." You'd know Jane is talking with saying that she is. (Ok, that's not a good example, but my brain's half on.)

The best case senarios are, of course, when you only have two people talking and you know who they are, so you don't need anything at all.

Well, a continous sucession of said is pretty annoying and boring (I find it stressing). But using too many different terms for the same thing is bad too. I personally like to make a balance between said, its similars and the action accompanied by dialogue. But mostly said ^^;.

Wow, some people have a problem with said. Interesting.

I don't. Said is nice and largely invisible. I mean there's no real harm in an occaissional "shouted". But generally I tend to aviod them. They stick out to much.

Dialogue shouldn't need things tagged all over it to make it creative and interesting.

Okay, I just feel like I have to say this, and the intention is certainly not to offend anyone. And I'm not one for generalizing, but...

Anyone who believes that other words should be used more often than 'said' just doesn't have experience in the writing field. I'm not being cruel or condescending, but brutally honest.

The word 'said' should probably be 80% of your tags, and maybe even more. The reason for this is that it becomes less of a drag on the dialog. Like other people have said, it is more or less invisible to the reader. Now it should not be used every line, but there should certainly not be ANY tag every line. If at all possible, use no tag. Tags should only be used to keep up with who said what.

Some other good advice is to avoid adverbs. This is because these adverbs also slow down the dialog and make it clunky and awkard. Your dialog should be good enough that the reader will already understand how something is said.

I was going to say something, but Trident just said it. So what Trident said, is pretty much what I would have said and I agree with what he said almost 100%.

I've said this before, but the best book to learn dialogue from is "The Confederacy of Dunces." The author almost never qualifies 'said,' and the only times he doesn't use 'said' is when he uses something like 'replied,' or 'asked.'

Moreover, the author of the book rarely even has to use 'said.' It's always very clear from the context who's speaking. On top of that, each character has their own distinct way of speaking, and not just in a "he speaks creole and she speaks New York" kind of way; the changes are instead very subtle to the naked eye, but still very easy for our brains to discern nonetheless as humans are conversational creatures. In fact, you may even try reading random posts on YWS and try to figure out who wrote it without looking at their name. For example, you can always tell if it's a post by Incandescence without looking.

And, it's true that some authors use 'said' too much, but usually it's not because they are not using synonyms but rather because they aren't properly setting up the dialogue.

the interesting thing about dialogue is, if its good dialogue, you often don't need to say "Jake said" or "He said." you know who's saying what without anouncing the fact. that is the test of great dialogue.