Said Is Dead?!

Jamesaritchie said:

In my opinion, saidisms don't just contribute to bad writing, they ARE bad writing. It's more like fretting about where the fire extinguisher is when your house is on fire.

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Listen to JAR on this one! He's dead on.

Don't rely on lazy saidisms to convey meaning. Learn to write nuanced dialogue blended with narration and gesture to convey how things are said.

Bufty said:

Said is dead? Codswallop.

It's this thread that should have remained dead.

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FIFY: "Said is dead?" questioned Bufty. "Codswallop," he cursed. "It's this thread that should have remained dead," he opined.

Devil Ledbetter said:

Listen to JAR on this one! He's dead on.

Don't rely on lazy saidisms to convey meaning. Learn to write nuanced dialogue blended with narration and gesture to convey how things are said.

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Listed to Devil on this one. She's dead on. Attribution should remain quietly in the background if it's used at all.

Sorry for the mature response here, but...

"Please make love to me!" Ophelia wailed.
"No!" Philip ejaculated.

This thread demonstrates beautifully how the "rules" are never rules.

The rules are exercises that train you out of common bad habits. When someone tells you a "rule", they're really saying, "Do this for a while until you learn how to write without using that crutch you've been leaning on."

As one of the characters in The Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett said, "Rules are there to make you think before you break them!"

Don't just apply the rule. Think about what that rule is trying to train you out of. Then apply the rule, but only as a way to teach yourself a new skill -- to re-train your brain.

And after you've learned the lesson, it's fine to break the "rule", because you'll have the skill to do so judiciously. It won't simply be your default anymore.

never write a word you wouldn't say

Justin K said:

never write a word you wouldn't say

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Good advice, generally, but if I followed it to the letter, I'd rarely use a quotation mark. In speech, you would usually say the first of these, and almost never the third:

She said she would think about it.
She said, "I'll think about it."
"I'll think about it," she said.

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Storytelling is a different register of language in some ways. In writing fiction, the third is the most preferred, since the content of what she said is most important, and the fact that someone said it is communicated by the punctuation. In conversational speech bringing up what someone else said is the exception, so it needs to be flagged from the start.

If you want to see how saidisms can be terrible when taken to extreme, read Atlanta Nights

jjdebenedictis said:

This thread demonstrates beautifully how the "rules" are never rules.

The rules are exercises that train you out of common bad habits. When someone tells you a "rule", they're really saying, "Do this for a while until you learn how to write without using that crutch you've been leaning on."

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Yes! Very well put.

Personally, I don't have an issue with the occasional non-said tag. Just don't let it get out of control, and try to avoid the silly ones.

Do you enjoy taking plain statements and turning them into gobbledygook?

morngnstar said:

Good advice, generally, but if I followed it to the letter, I'd rarely use a quotation mark. In speech, you would usually say the first of these, and almost never the third:



Storytelling is a different register of language in some ways. In writing fiction, the third is the most preferred, since the content of what she said is most important, and the fact that someone said it is communicated by the punctuation. In conversational speech bringing up what someone else said is the exception, so it needs to be flagged from the start.

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BethS said:

Yes! Very well put.

Personally, I don't have an issue with the occasional non-said tag. Just don't let it get out of control, and try to avoid the silly ones.

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And please never use intoned. It's a book-waller.

Devil Ledbetter said:

And please never use intoned. It's a book-waller.

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Yeah. Or opined. That one makes me cringe.

Some writers use creative tags like crazy as a part of their voice and style. It's not a technique that's generally recommended by agents and editors, unless you want to call attention to the tag.

But something tells me that a site aimed at children is not giving them tips for writing marketable prose so much as it's trying to encourage things like creativity, vocabulary building and a certain level of comfort with written language.

Flapdoodle said:

"Get away from my Dick!" said Tom, cockily.

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Nathan Bransford said:

Oh my gosh, said is not dead. People don't read "said" consciously, so they don't read it as repetitive. No one should use an alternative to "said" or "asked" unless it is absolutely necessary. It should be clear from the dialogue how it is said or how the other character is responding.

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Personally, I like "continued" as well. I use it when a character is interrupted by something other than dialogue (like a sigh or laugh) and then continues speaking after a moment of silence to acknowledge the annoyance.

I used to avoid doing this all together, but I found there are times when other dialogue tags or 'ly" words just feel right. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does, I don't avoid it out of fear of breaking the rules. Especially because I see it all the time in published works.

Whenever I can, I avoid using any dialogue tags at all.

I can see limiting the use of "said" in school papers as a way to get students to expand their vocabularies. Outside of that, though, no. A dialogue tag has one purpose and one purpose only -- to identify who is speaking. The only caveat to that is when using a verb that modifies the volume of the voice (e.g. shouted, screamed, whispered, etc.) Anything else is explanatory on the dialogue itself. You don't need to tell the reader "he answered" when the dialogue is in answer to a question or previous statement. As said previously, that is simply bad writing.

A string of dialogue with a dialogue tag on every paragraph is overkill, but leaving off dialogue tags over too long of a space is just as bad, even if it's just between two people. If for no other reason than the writer sometimes minces the characters' voice. I can't tell you how many times I've had to stop reading and go over a section a few times to work out who is saying what. That only happens when the author went too long without adding some kind of speaker attribute.

Adding in character actions helps to break up the string of "saids" very well and keeps the scene from becoming the hideous "talking mannequins" style. Also, putting the dialogue tag in the middle of the paragraph, at the first decent pause, helps to make the tag even more invisible.

You need a balance, and that balance will tend to vary depending on the scene and how long each character speaks, how many are speaking in that group, and how busy they are at the time the dialogue is happening. That's one of the fun things about writing.

Michael Steven said:

Also, putting the dialogue tag in the middle of the paragraph, at the first decent pause, helps to make the tag even more invisible.

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My favorite aspect is that it can be a virtually invisible beat in the dialogue. If there's a natural pause as a character is speaking, or if you just want the reader to get the sensation that the character is speaking more slowly, you can use the dialogue tag to get that effect based on where you place it.

"Oh f***," he ejaculated. "I hate said bookisms."

"And watch your language," she admonished censoriously. "I don't like profanity either."

"I'll examine this matter more closely," he expostulated intuitively.

caw

More ejaculations, please. I do enjoy them.

Kallithrix said:

Was the character from New Zealand?

"Hey mate, d'you want fush n chups?"

"Yip!"

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lol Don't people in other countries say "yip"?

gingerwoman said:

lol Don't people in other countries say "yip"?

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I dunno. 'Yep' is more common in the UK, but Kiwis have this whole random lottery with vowel sounds...

Michael Steven said:

You don't need to tell the reader "he answered" when the dialogue is in answer to a question or previous statement. As said previously, that is simply bad writing.

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Oh dear, we'll have to disagree on this one. Spelling out questions and answers may not be strictly necessary, but sometimes 'asked' or 'replied' just feels more natural than 'said'. I actually have a problem with questions being 'said' rather than asked. It jars with me, so no, I don't think this is automatically 'bad writing' - it just depends what you're familiar with.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with that.

The purpose of the dialogue tag is to identify the speaker, and if identification is needed then the sooner that is done the better. Burying a speaker identification tag in the middle of a paragraph thinking it makes the tag 'even more invisible' is both self-deception and wrong.

Tag use is based upon necessity and clarity. Use whatever tag is needed, put it in its appropriate place and forget about invisibility. If it's the wrong tag in the wrong place it will interrupt the flow, disturb clarity, and stand out no matter how much you try to hide it.

Michael Steven said:

...Also, putting the dialogue tag in the middle of the paragraph, at the first decent pause, helps to make the tag even more invisible.

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Heck ... now that's what I call a zombie thread.

I'm tempted to walk on by, but I can't resist a bit of saidism with my morning coffee. I think there are some misconceptions here that we need to talk about.

First, we have the "blame the schools" argument. How could schools possibly give advice as poor as "said is dead"?

Part of the answer, I think, is that some teachers may not actually be saying that. Sometimes a teacher will give a long and carefully balanced explanation, but the students will only take from it the one or two nuggets that resonate with them. We all like simple rules. So sometimes the problem is not with the teachers, but in how the well the students have absorbed the lesson.

Of course, schools are not necessarily trying to take kids to a publishable standard. They are trying to get them to express themselves, to be creative, to learn about language, to make their scenes more vivid. If that means the writing is a little purple, then why not?

Then we have the idea that saidisms are automatically bad writing. I think we need to put this into context. The modern fashion is to use the word said and to avoid synonyms for said including "said xxxly".

But try this - pick up just about any classic novel from say more than fifty years ago and look at a few pages at random. And there is a very good chance that you are going to find people crying, replying, ejaculating, expostulating. Not to mention saying thusly and thatly.

I tried that and couldn't find an older novel on my bookshelves that didn't break the modern diktats about said. For that matter, I found a few highly successful modern novels which also happily broke the rules, including the first Harry Potter with its many said xxlys.

Highly successful books - many of them classics - all breaking the saidism rules. Hmmm.

This aversion to said is a modern fashion which may well change in the future. We may find that other new rules come in which make our current writing seem old-fashioned. For all we know, said might disappear to be replaced by an even simpler attribution, such as a simply colon:

Fred: I love you.

Emily: I know.

Or we may go back to grunting and ejaculating? Fifty shades of said?
So is it bad writing per se - or simply writing that is currently considered to be bad?

I think we can all agree that overusing any one type of attribution can look awkward. A page full of saids can be boring. A page full of whispers, cries, grunts and yips can be noisy and confusing. And I hate reading line after line of unattributed dialogue where I have to count back to work out who the hell is saying what.

But we need to be careful that we don't turn this into an author obsession. Readers don't seem to care about it as much as we do. I have seen authors worry about said so much that they forget to tell an interesting story or develop rounded characters.

Incidentally, I'm with Kallithrix on the question of said vs asked. As a reader it feels artificial to me if a character says a question. That seems to be an author trying very hard to avoid saying anything other than said. We can take the aversion to non-saids a little too far.

Someone far cleverer than me (which isn't hard) said that the actual dialogue should be so zingy that we don't need to point out who said it, how they said it or how they were feeling when they said it. I think that's the main point here - not what can sometimes be a slightly dogmatic addiction to said and an aversion to anything that isn't said.

I was taught this same rule, and it was very clearly, "Don't use said." However, it was taught by a teacher in middle/high school who also taught literature and English. I have a huge amount of respect for teachers, but they can't be an expert in all aspects of the field. In our case, this teacher preferred and excelled at grammatical English and wasn't as good at the creative side of it. She had a list of rules that she'd been told to teach, and didn't have the experience in that branch of writing to realize that it wasn't an all-or-nothing. So yeah, sometimes it's actually flagrantly taught.

On the good side, all of those writing rules I was taught did make me a better writer. In many arts, it's better to go too far rather than not far enough, and all these "rules" made my dialogue way over the top and too purple. Over the years, and with teachers who were more into the creative side of writing, that all got edited down to a point where my dialogue and dialogue tags are the best part of my writing.

Course, I also have abandoned the plethora of saidisms that used to litter my writing, and only the best get used these days.

"By Jove, that was a cunning bit of detection!" enthused the Colonel,

from Cocaine Blues: Phryne Fisher #1

gingerwoman said:

lol Don't people in other countries say "yip"?

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I tend to say "yiss" instead of "yes", although that's not normal where I live. It's definitely my own quirk.

But I sounded just like the locals when I visited South Africa recently! (Only when I said "yes", however.)