“Let’s distract the reader.” said Harry. I hate them so, so much. Dialogue tags, an afterthought after the sentence. My biggest issue with them, truly, is that they don’t do anything normally. People say vary them, and you get: exclaimed, shrieked, shouted, crooned. It becomes thesaurus synonym hell. Every dialogue is met with a pattern of these peppered in, and like an editor sees the transitional cuts in a movie, it is not invisible.

Going back to the beginning example, something I’ve found useful is prepending an action before the dialogue. Take this for example: Harry opened Microsoft Word. “Let’s distract the reader.”

Much better. We know immediately who this belongs to. Now devil’s advocate time. If you need to signal an action, then dialogue tags can be useful. Like: “I’m in.” said the hacker, clacking away at his keyboard. Now it’s earned. Justify every tag, what is it really doing, or are you just slapping a nametag on a character? It shouldn’t be a script format unless you want to do that.

Now take my advice with a grain of salt, I’m just a dude ranting on the internet, but if you do find it useful let me know. I genuinely think if you follow those rules, you will be a better writer.