Said Is Dead?!

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ChunkyC

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However, I still think that it's better to teach kids the right thing than to teach them the wrong thing and hope they'll unlearn it and get it right in high school.
Which is why the entire track a student follows through school is important. They should never be taught, then abandoned when their education is only a few years along. The teaching should change as the student grows and becomes more sophisticated.

I think learning to get your story across without all the -ly tags and excessive ad-verbiage is tremendous. Once you can do that, you can skillfully add them like spice in pinches to flavour your story instead of dumping the entire box of black pepper into your soup and ending up with an unpalatable mess.
 

maestrowork

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There's a difference between writing for children (using tags and adverbs to help them understand the story) and teaching them how to write. Just my opinion.
 

CaroGirl

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Learning to write consists of reading a lot and practising your writing. My son is just now getting a really firm handle on what an adverb is and what its function is in a sentence. I'm not about to tell him never to use one. I'll let him go to adverbial town as much as he wants. At his age (he's 8) it's all about learning and experimenting. He can learn the finer points when he's much older.
 

ChunkyC

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CaroGirl said:
Learning to write consists of reading a lot and practising your writing. My son is just now getting a really firm handle on what an adverb is and what its function is in a sentence. I'm not about to tell him never to use one. I'll let him go to adverbial town as much as he wants. At his age (he's 8) it's all about learning and experimenting. He can learn the finer points when he's much older.
Oh, certainly. When a kid first 'gets' what's funny about lines like the swifties we just posted above, it can spark their enjoyment of wordplay, and that's always a good thing.
 

Albedo of Zero

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"Let me make this perfectly clear," said the invisible man.


oh wait...wrong example...



"This vanishing cream is well worth the price," she clearly said to Vincent.




Anyway, said is not dead and adverbs still live. It's just that they aren't as sociable as they used to be.
 

cattywampus

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There is nothing wrong with "said." When only two characters are talking it can be dropped. When more than two characters are talking, I like to relieve "said" with action, so:

"I saw her last night." Jim took his hat off and scratched his head. "She was alone at 10:00."

I never have considered Rowling a good writer. She copies heavily from Tolkein, it seems to me, but kids are not very discriminating: 8-10 year olds may not know yet that the use of Tom Swifties and -ly adverbs screams lazy writing (Bill Bryson is an exception). I'd rather produce one novel that approaches perfection than 1,000,000,000,000 words of tripe. Just my opinion of course.
 

badducky

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I wonder how many times I used "said" in my current WiP?

Hm. A little help from Microsoft word's handy features.... 627 times in 378 pages.

I have a lot of work left to do if I want to replace all those "saids" with just the right word.

After that, I'm going to have to add some tasty sprinklings of adverbs. Apparently, I'm going to need about 627 of them.
 

pconsidine

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Clearly, when it comes to writing for adults, it's a matter of the tools that a writer has at her disposal to tell her story. Judicious use of adverbs in dialogue is nothing more worthy of execution than spelling color with a "u" - it's part of the organism that is language.

As far as what we teach children, though, we usually start them off with broad strokes of something ("always do this, never do that") and introduce finer distinctions as we go along. Granted, if something should change in the course of that path, kids can often be left hanging with some nasty generalizations, but on the whole it's not a bad route to go.
 

badducky

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I did a "Replace" function, under the edit menu. I replaced "Said" with "Supercallafragalisticexpialladocious".


Then, the program told me exactly how many replacements were made.

Then, I clicked the handy undo button.
 

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I have noticed that some of my favorite authors use the word "disgustedly" a lot, especially to modify said.

Is this some sort of brain-worm?
 

zeprosnepsid

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I disagree that we should teach kids one way when they're children only to explain to them later why that wasn't exactly right. I have this severe bitterness about matter because of this very fact. My whole childhood there were three types of matter. Then I get to high school and boom! Four types of matter. I really felt lied to. Why couldn't they just tell me when I was younger that there were four types and we'd get to the fourth one later? That would have been honest. But when you have a test that asks "name the three types of matter" -- you assume there are only three types of matter. boo.

Anyway, I think all these rules are silly. Sure, you should know why using too many adverbs is not advisable but there really are no rules. For every rule you can name someone else can name a top selling book that breaks them. I think it's more important for an author to have a voice and connect with readers and it doesn't matter how they do it. If adverbs serve my story, so be it. I'm not getting rid of my adverbs. That's for sure. And 'said' is just fine with me too.
 

pconsidine

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zeprosnepsid said:
I disagree that we should teach kids one way when they're children only to explain to them later why that wasn't exactly right. I have this severe bitterness about matter because of this very fact. My whole childhood there were three types of matter. Then I get to high school and boom! Four types of matter. I really felt lied to.
Imagine how I felt when I learned about antimatter. :)
 

Jamesaritchie

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cattywampus said:
There is nothing wrong with "said." When only two characters are talking it can be dropped. When more than two characters are talking, I like to relieve "said" with action, so:

"I saw her last night." Jim took his hat off and scratched his head. "She was alone at 10:00."

I never have considered Rowling a good writer. She copies heavily from Tolkein, it seems to me, but kids are not very discriminating: 8-10 year olds may not know yet that the use of Tom Swifties and -ly adverbs screams lazy writing (Bill Bryson is an exception). I'd rather produce one novel that approaches perfection than 1,000,000,000,000 words of tripe. Just my opinion of course.



I think Rowling is as far from Tolkien as it's humanly possible to get. Of course, my definition of a good children's writer is a writer millions of kids love, and keep loving book after book after book. I don't think it's possible to fool kids. When kids say someone is a great writer, that person is a magnificent writer.

A novel that makes kids read, that millions of kids sit around waiting for, is perfection.

Tripe is any novel no one wants to read, and one where no one wants a sequel.

But Tolkien? Guess I'm going to have to read Tolkien again. I don't see even the slightest resemblance between Rowling and Tolkien.
 

Jamesaritchie

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find

Sharon Mock said:
How did you do that?

Just type "said" into the find box, then type "said" in the "replace with" box.

Click "replace all." Word will tell you how many times it replaced the word "said."
 

A. J. Luxton

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ChunkyC said:
"We may have to amputate," the surgeon said disarmingly.

That puts me in mind of a terrible one I made up, long ago, in homage to The Empire Strikes Back:

"AAAAAAAUGH!" screamed Luke offhandedly.
 
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Steve 211

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I agree - for kids, let them play. It's like a kid on guitar - loosening the strings and going dwoing dwoing dwoing isn't going to get them on an album, but it's fun to mess around before nailing down your skills.

Even with adults, everyone should play what sounds like music to their ears. If you know the difference, and still like it, go for it. Cormac McCarthy didn't even bother with quotation marks.

I like whispered, shouted, and even grumbled, as well as quietly and slowly, but other than that, I stick with Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/brain/2006/03/mark-twains-rules-of-writing.html
 

Popeyesays

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Steve 211 said:
I like whispered, shouted, and even grumbled, as well as quietly and slowly, but other than that, I stick with Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

I was trained as actor, director, and wrote plays once upon a time. Actors rarely use the word "said" on stage. The action goes with the dialogue and we don't have to have the characters attribute dialogue to themselves.

However, in fiction this is hard to accomplish. There is no actor to demonstrate the action. Dialogue tags are better. A two person conversation rarely needs attribution either, but limiting the action to "said" can't be a good idea as a hard and fast rule. It won't work for everyone. If you are describing what the character DOES rather than what he says, it is usually easy to attribute dialogue for the reader. Mob scenes, battle scenes, ship-sinkings and car wrecks may have accompanying dialogue or not, but one cannot have them all "say" "said".

Regards,
Scott
 

gp101

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Popeyesays said:
Mob scenes, battle scenes, ship-sinkings and car wrecks may have accompanying dialogue or not, but one cannot have them all "say" "said".

Regards,
Scott

Sure you can. Elmore does it all the time. Depends how good you are with dialogue. If you set up your action and emotion properly like Elmore and others, then the occasional "said" is used simply as it was intended--as a tag. You won't need that "muttered" or "grumbled" or "said contemptuously" because you've already established the mood with clever narrative and/or dialogue. In that way, "said" almost becomes invisible.

"Or you could be lazy and add a silly said-wannabe or an adverb," he retorted.
 

gp101

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jst5150 said:
This is totally unrelated but ...
B: It's not a motorcycle baby. It's a chopper.
F: Who's chopper is this?
B: It's Said's chopper.
F: Who's Said?
B: Said, dead, baby. Said's dead.

So shoot me for being gullible and not getting the joke... but you do realize the character's name is "Zed", right? "Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead." Hence, the big "Z" on the motorcycle's key chain.
 
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