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He Said, She Said: How to Use Speech Tags & Dialogue Tags Effectively

by Fija Callaghan

What is dialogue?

Dialogue is the spoken interaction between two or more characters. Usually, dialogue is spoken out loud, but it can also be things like sign language or telekinesis — it’s any form of expression, as long as the characters can understand each other. Dialogue can be used to develop characters, convey exposition about your story’s world, or move the plot forward.

Ultimately, learning how to write dialogue in a story is one of the most important skills in a writer’s toolbox.

In order to write clear, concise dialogue that will elevate your story and engage your readers, you’ll need to understand how to use dialogue tags. Also called speech tags, these unassuming words can make or break an otherwise well-written scene. But what is a dialogue tag, exactly, and how do we use it to take our story to the next level? By following a few basic principles, you’ll be writing compelling dialogue in no time. Let’s dive in.

What are dialogue tags?

Dialogue tags (or speech tags) are short phrases that identify the speaker of a line of dialogue. They can occur before, during, or after a character’s spoken dialogue. They’re used to make it clear who’s speaking and help the reader follow the conversation. The most common dialogue tag in writing is “he said” or “she said.”

There are a few different ways to write dialogue tags, and we’ll look at them all in more detail below. Here’s a quick example:

“I made some coffee,” said Julie.

Here, “‘I made some coffee’” is the dialogue, and “said Julie” is the dialogue tag. They both appear on the same line in the story.

Why do we use dialogue tags in fiction writing?

We use dialogue tags and speech tags in a story to clarify who’s talking so that the reader doesn’t get confused, as well as to give more depth and context to the words that are being said. If your on-page conversation goes too long without a dialogue tag, your reader can lose track of who’s saying what. When this happens, they need to stop reading, go back to the top of the conversation, and count each line to try and remember whose turn it is to talk. At this point, you’ve broken their connection to the story.

However, be mindful of using repetitive dialogue tags. Punctuating dialogue with too many tags is one of the common mistakes new writers often make. Using too many can weigh down the actual dialogue and distract from the story. Instead, use tags only when needed or when they add another layer to the characters speaking.

Dialogue tags also give us a way to break up long stretches of story dialogue, to add movement to the scene, and to reveal something new about the character. Here are a few examples of effective dialogue tags:

“So you’re finally done with that jerk?” he said, leaning forward.

She took a sip of her drink. “Looks that way.”

The first speaker has an action attached to his speech tag that gives us a hint about how he’s feeling. The second speaker has an action preceding her dialogue that also gives a hint about how she’s feeling. With just these two simple lines, we can already imagine the story building up around them.

Sometimes, a speech tag can change the inflection of a line of story dialogue. For example,

“Look at that!” he said, spreading his cards out on the table. “A full house.”

“You’ve had a lot of luck this evening,” said John irritably.

What if we changed the dialogue tag?

“You’ve had a lot of luck this evening,” said John, grinning.

The dialogue stays exactly the same, but the context and the relationship between the two characters shifts because we’ve used a different dialogue tag. If you were to just use “said John” as your dialogue tag, the reader could imagine several different scenarios. You’d have to find other places to sneak in the background information they needed to understand the dialogue’s subtext.

Used in this way, a well-placed dialogue tag can communicate something a lot bigger about your story. We’ll look at different ways to say “said” in writing and other words for “said” when writing story dialogue later on in this article.

You may also notice that the capitalization changes when the line ends in an exclamation mark. We’ll take a closer look at placing dialogue tags and the rules of appropriate punctuation below.

When to use speech tags in writing

You’ll notice from the examples above that the placement of the dialogue tags can shift from one line to another; they don’t always stay in the same place. Let’s look at how to format dialogue when using dialogue tags before, during, and after a line of speech.

How to use speech tags before dialogue

In some older novels, you’ll see speech tags being used before the dialogue:

Shane said, “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

This sentence structure has generally fallen out of favor in contemporary writing. The exception? If your character is quoting someone else:

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then Shane said, ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’”

Usually, the best way to use a dialogue tag before a line of speech is to choose an action for your character:

Sheila gasped. “He really said that?”

Here, the action tag identifies Sheila as the speaker. We’ll look closer at using action tags further below.

How to use speech tags in the middle of dialogue

Using dialogue tags can be a good way to break up long lines of dialogue, to imply a natural pause in the line, or to convey a shift in tone. For example:

“I just feel so tired all the time,” she said. “Like nothing matters anymore.”

Compare with the dialogue tag used at the end:

“I just feel so tired all the time. Like nothing matters anymore,” she said.

In the latter, the line of dialogue feels faster, like a singular thought. In the former, we feel like the speaker has paused for breath, or paused to add a new idea. Neither one of these is right or wrong; it’s up to you to decide which one is the best fit for that particular moment of your story.

Here’s another example:

“I just feel so tired all the time. Like nothing matters anymore,” she said. “But after tomorrow, things will be different.”

Here, the dialogue tag serves as an axis between one tone and another. The line begins feeling despondent, hinges on the dialogue tag, and ends feeling hopeful.

How to use tags at the end of the dialogue

Many contemporary writers favor placing speech tags after a line of dialogue. For example:

“It smells wonderful in here,” said Kate.

This structure puts the emphasis on the dialogue, rather than the dialogue tag. The reader’s attention focuses on what the character is saying, and the speech tag works on a near-subconscious level to make sure they don’t get confused about who’s saying what.

You can also give the character an action after their dialogue:

“It smells wonderful in here.” Kate opened the oven and peeked inside.

This gives the reader a bit more context about what’s happening and makes the scene come alive.

How to punctuate dialogue tags

You may have noticed in some of these examples that the punctuation in a dialogue tag can change. Let’s take a closer look at how to format dialogue tags, as well as some alternative speech tag formats you might come across in literature.

Using double and single quotation marks

In North American literature, lines of dialogue are enclosed in double quotation marks, like this:

“I love this song.”

In European English, however, you’ll often see single quotation marks used instead, like this:

‘I love this song.’

For this article we’ll be focusing on using standard North American grammar.

If your dialogue stands alone without any speech tag (like just above), you’ll end the line in a period. If you’re adding a speech tag in the form of a verb that describes the dialogue—said, whispered, shouted, etc—you’ll end the line of dialogue in a comma just before the closing quotation mark, and start the dialogue tag with a lowercase letter:

“I love this song,” she said.

(Unless your dialogue tag begins with a proper noun, such as “Charlotte said”—always capitalize these!)

However , if you follow the line of dialogue with an action that is separate from the speech, you’ll end the dialogue with a period and begin the next bit with a capital letter, the same as if you didn’t use any tag at all:

“I love this song.” She reached over and turned up the volume.

Always include your dialogue’s punctuation inside quotation marks.

So far so good? Now things are about to get a little weird. What happens if your dialogue ends in a question mark or an exclamation point? Strangely enough, the rules for capitalization actually stay the same:

“I love this song!” she said.

“I love this song!” She reached over and turned up the volume.

North American English does use single quotation marks too. As we saw in one of our earlier examples, single quotes are used for dialogue within dialogue. This is called “nested dialogue.”

“In the words of Shakespeare, ‘To thine self be true.’”

“I was on my way out when I overheard him say, ‘I’ll meet you at our old spot.’ What old spot was he talking about?”

In European English, the rules for nested dialogue is reversed, like this:

‘I was on my way out when I overheard him say, “I’ll meet you at our old spot.” What old spot was he talking about?’

Sometimes you’ll see dialogue being set off from the rest of the text with em-dashes. This can create a vivid, cinematic effect in your writing; however, you’ll have to be very careful that your dialogue doesn’t blur into your narrative. Here’s an example from Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing :

—I want an American suit, I told him.

—Suit? I had the rest of the anarchist’s cash burning a hole in the pocket of my old one.

—American, I told him.—A good one.

You can see how the dialogue tags—“I told him”—are kept deliberately simple, and the longer action is set apart on its own line. The em-dashes show us when the speech starts up again. However, this type of dialogue punctuation is very rare and experimental; the safest option is always to use standard quotation marks, like we looked at above.

No punctuation

Sometimes authors will experiment with using no distinguishing punctuation at all. This makes the story read very smoothly and intimately, like the reader is really there in person. However, just like using em-dashes, care must be taken to keep the dialogue and the narrative very distinct from each other so that the reader understands what’s being said and what’s being thought or described.

Here’s an example from The Houseboat , by Dane Bahr:

This have something to do with that grave robbery?

No sir, Clinton said. I don’t believe so. That was down in Cedar Rapids.

I see. Well. Ness leaned back and closed his eyes again. What can I do for you, Deputy?

Yeh get the mornin paper up there? The Tribune I think it is?

Looking at it right now, Ness said. He leaned forward in his chair and looked at the picture on the front page.

Even though this is written in third person narrative, you can see how each dialogue tag begins with a name—“Clinton said,” rather than “said Clinton.” This gives the reader a subconscious cue that the words are shifting from dialogue to description. Stripping away the punctuation of your dialogue like this gives the reader a feeling like they’re listening in on a private conversation in the next room.

Experimenting with alternative dialogue tag punctuation can be a great way to stretch your comfort zone as a writer. However, clarity for the reader should always be at the forefront of your mind.

These two alternative punctuation methods are fun to work with, but they are very experimental and an unusual choice in modern literature. In professional writing, both fiction and non-fiction, quotation marks are the universal standard.

Other words for “said” when writing dialogue

Writers are big fans of using “said” for their dialogue tags, because it doesn’t draw attention away from what really matters: your story. But sometimes you might want to enhance your dialogue tag with another word to give it some more emphasis. Let’s look at different ways to say “said” in writing.

How to use verbs as dialogue tags

You may remember your primary school teacher telling you to look for other words for “said” in dialogue: whispered, shouted, chastised, sulked, muttered, screeched, sobbed… you can have a lot of fun digging up synonyms for “said” in story dialogue, but most of the time, less is more. You want your reader’s attention to be on the words that your characters are saying and the story surrounding them, rather than the mechanics of your dialogue tags.

However, there are times when using a different verb for your speech tag can enhance the narrative or convey new information. For example, compare the following:

“I hate you,” she said.

“I hate you!” she shouted.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

Each dialogue tag gives the line a slightly different feel. Because the words are so simple, “said” feels a bit empty and non-committal; using a different word gives the reader context for the words that are being spoken.

Now compare these two lines:

“Look at the state of your clothes! People are going to think you’ve been sleeping in a barn,” she chastised.

“Look at the state of your clothes! People are going to think you’ve been sleeping in a barn,” she said.

In this instance, the verb “chastised” is redundant because we can already tell that she’s chastising from what she’s saying. It doesn’t give the reader any new information. In this case, it’s better to fall back on “said” and allow the dialogue to do the (literal and figurative) talking.

When you’re considering using other verbs for your speech tag, ask yourself if it reveals something new about what the person is saying. If not, simpler is always better.

How to use dialogue tags with adverbs

Adverbial dialogue tags are where you use a modifying word to enhance your dialogue tag, such as “said angrily,” or “whispered venomously.” As with using other verbs instead of “said,” most of the time, less is more. However, sometimes using adverbial tags can contribute surprising new information about the scene.

Consider these examples:

“I hate you,” she said scathingly.

“I hate you,” she said gleefully.

“I hate you,” she said nervously.

Each adverb tells us something different about what’s being said. But do you need them?

Telling someone you hate them is already pretty scathing, so you probably don’t need to show it a second time with your dialogue tag. Saying it gleefully is very different in tone, and makes us wonder: what’s this person so happy about? What makes this moment special to her? Saying it nervously is different again, and raises questions about the scene—is this the first time it’s been said? What are the consequences for saying it?

“Gleefully” is probably the strongest adverb choice in these examples, because it’s at odds with what’s being spoken; it gives the line a whole new context. “Nervously” is nicely specific too, but you can also find other ways to show nervousness in the character’s actions, which might feel more natural and organic to the reader. “Scathingly” doesn’t really tell us anything new about what’s being said.

When considering adverbs for your dialogue tag, again ask yourself if they communicate something new to the reader that the dialogue doesn’t show on its own. If it does, then ask yourself if it communicates that something in the most natural, efficient way possible. You can explore different ways of conveying these emotions or details in your scene to find which one works best for your dialogue.

Dialogue tags vs. actions tags

Dialogue tags, as we’ve seen, begin with a speech verb—usually “said,” but sometimes other words like “whispered,” “yelled,” or “mumbled.” They work to identify the person who is speaking.

Action tags, on the other hand, work like a dialogue tag but aren’t directly connected to the line of dialogue. They can be related, but they stand independently. Just like dialogue tags, action tags work to identify the person speaking. These are especially helpful if you’re writing a scene with three or more people, where things can get confusing pretty quickly.

Additional speech tags examples

Here’s an example of action tags and dialogue tags working together:

“So here’s how it’s going to go down,” said Donny. “We’ll meet at midnight, after the cinema closes.”

Mark took a sip of his drink. “What about the night patrol?”

“The night patrol is a sixteen-year-old kid on minimum wage.” Roger leaned back in his chair. “You worry too much.”

“I’m not getting rough with a kid, Donny.”

“Then let’s hope he’s smart enough to stay out of the way.” He took a sip of his drink too, then stood up. “I’ll see you both tonight. Get the car ready.”

Let’s break down what we’ve done here. We have dialogue with a few variations: one dialogue tag, three action tags, and one freestanding line with no tag at all. The first dialogue tag, “said Donny,” establishes who the first speaker is. Then a new action tag introduces a second speaker, Mark. This works well because then we don’t have two “saids” in a row and it flows naturally for the reader. In the next line, a third speaker comes in, so we give him an action to make sure the reader knows who’s speaking.

As we get to the fourth line, the reader already understands enough about the scene to know who is speaking, so we can leave this one on its own. The next line doesn’t identify the speaker by name—we use “he”—but it’s a direct response to the line before it, so we know who it is. The action tag breaks up an otherwise long and unwieldy line of dialogue, and turns the scene in a new direction: the group is breaking up until later. Each speech tag gives the reader little clues that make the dialogue and the scene come alive.

“Said she” vs. “she said”—what’s the difference?

When you’re writing a dialogue tag, is it better to write “Jane said,” or “said Jane?” This is something that a lot of new writers get caught up on, and technically, either one can be correct. Most contemporary literature favors the subject followed by the verb—that is, “Jane” (the subject) “said” (the verb). If you’re using a pronoun—he, she, they—this is the only way it works grammatically. However, using a proper noun after the verb—“said Jane”—is more common in older literature and is still in use.

In general, “she said” is a better fit for modern stories. If you’re writing historical fiction or something influenced by archaic myth and fantasy, either one is acceptable. You can play around with both in your writing to see which one feels more natural in that moment of your scene.

When to use he said/she said vs. he says/she says

The distinction between when to use he said/she said vs. he says/she says often confuses newer writers. The answer to when to use one or the other goes back to the tense your story is written in.

Stories written in the present tense will use present tense speech tags like “he says” and “she says,” while stories written in the past tense will use past tense speech tags like “he said” and “she said.” You might use other tenses throughout your story, so always keep an eye out for the tense you’re currently using and adapt your speech tags accordingly.

Dialogue tags: Examples

Here are a few more examples of ways to use a descriptive dialogue tag to inspire your writing.

1. Hotel Magnifique , by Emily J. Taylor

One of the older girls shoved a lock of greasy blonde hair behind her pink ear. “That advertisement is a tease. It would be a miracle if any of us got a job.”

I straightened. “That’s not true.”

She shrugged as she turned away. “Do what you want. I wouldn’t waste my time.”

“Think she’s right?” Zosa asked, her delicate mouth turning down.

“Absolutely not,” I said, perhaps too quickly. When Zosa’s frown deepened, I cursed silently.

In this example, three girls are talking about a job advertisement. In the first three lines, action tags are used rather than dialogue tags, showing not only the action but the personality and feelings of the people speaking. After the first three lines, which all begin with action tags, the next two lines lead with the dialogue instead and use simple dialogue tags to identify who’s talking.

2. The Paris Library , by Janet Skeslien Charles

“A fourth of the Library’s subscribers are Parisian,” I countered. “They need French-speaking staff.”

“What will people think?” Maman fretted. “They’ll say Papa isn’t providing for you.”

“Many girls have jobs these days,” Remy said.

“Odile doesn’t need to work,” Papa said.

“But she wants to,” I said softly.

“Let’s not argue.” Maman scooped the mousse au chocolat into small crystal bowls.

Here, a family argues about a young woman’s desire to work at the library. The first two lines use descriptive tags in place of “said.” These enhance our understanding of the particular character, but because this can get cumbersome quickly if overused, the next three lines use “said” to let the spoken words shine through. Finally, the writer drops the dialogue tags in favor of an action tag which turns the scene in a new direction.

3. The League of Gentlewomen Witches , by India Holton

“Several people have been killed,” Mrs. Pettifer reported. “It’s quite shocking.”

Miss Plim pecked irritably at her tea. “Something more shocking happened yesterday.”

“Indeed?” Mrs. Pettifer flicked over another page. “You smiled at someone?”

“No. I was in Twinings and that Darlington woman walked in. She acknowledged me politely with a nod.”

At this, Mrs. Pettifer finally looked up, her velvety eyes growing wide. “Not Miss Darlington, the pirate?”

Here, two women gossip over a newspaper. The first line uses a speech tag, then two lines use action tags to identify the speaker before the next line stands alone; the reader has grown comfortable enough with the back-and-forth dialogue to recognize the speaker of the next line. Then, the following line begins with an action tag that marks a turning point in their conversation.

You’ll notice in all of these dialogue tag examples above that writers favor patterns of three. Three uses of “said” in a row, three action tags, three similar speech tags before shifting into another method of identifying the speaker. Three is a comfortable number for a reader, but if you go on using the same devices for more than that the reader will begin to notice how repetitive they are, which will pull them away from your story. This is a good trick to keep in mind when formatting your dialogue.

5 rules for using dialogue tags

To wrap up, let’s review some dialogue rules and best practices for use of dialogue tags in your story.

1. Limit overuse of dialogue tags

How often should dialogue tags be used? As with many aspects of the writer’s craft, when working with dialogue tags in your story, less is more. See how often you can get away with not using any dialogue tags at all (keep in mind sets of three, as we looked at above). Space out your dialogue tags so that they don’t take up too much real estate on your page. Your reader should be focusing on your story, not your story mechanics.

2. Use a dialogue tag when it’s unclear who’s speaking

Dialogue tags are used first and foremost for clarity. Use them when you need to remind the reader of who’s saying which line. You won’t need to use them as often when your dialogue is only happening between two people; if you have a group of people all talking together, you’ll need to use them a bit more to keep everybody straight.

3. Vary the positioning of dialogue tags

In our examples above, you’ll see that sometimes the dialogue tag comes at the beginning of a line of dialogue, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end. If you always put your dialogue tag in the same place, it can get monotonous for the reader. Experiment with different placements for your speech tags to keep the dialogue fluid and fresh.

4. Vary the type of dialogue tags

Although we love the classic “she said” and “said she” dialogue tags, relying on these all the time can start to weigh down your story. Try alternating between dialogue tags, descriptive action tags, and a few alternate verb dialogue tags here and there to keep your story from feeling too routine. These can illustrate your characters’ body language and help reveal their underlying motivations. It will make your story feel more present and immersive than if you used “said” in every single line.

5. Avoid using adverbs too frequently in dialogue tags

That being said, using adverbs as part of your dialogue tag should be done with a very light hand. Used sparingly, they can give dimension to many characters and their experiences; however, too many can make your story feel overburdened and sluggish. Use adverbs and alternative verbs for your dialogue tags only when they enhance the dialogue. Wherever possible, allow the words of the dialogue to speak for themselves.

One last question—is there a difference between “dialog” vs. “dialogue”?

It’s common to be confused when it comes to the differences between dialog vs. dialogue. The two are homonyms, and they’re interchangeable depending on which country you’re in! In the United States, the word “dialogue” is the preferred word for referencing a conversation or exchange of communication like what you’d find in a story, while the word “dialog,” at least in American English, is used more specifically when referring to computing—like a “dialog box” that appears on your computer to communicate something to you. So remember to use “dialogue tags” rather than “dialog tags”!

Hopefully that clears up any dialog vs. dialogue confusion!

Effective dialogue tags will elevate your story

So small and easily overlooked, yet such an essential part of any story, dialogue tags and speech tags are one of the most basic tools a writer has at their disposal. By mastering the use of dialogue tags and the rules of dialogue in a story, your story will take on new dimension and feel that much more real to your readers.

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The art of writing is more than just stringing words together. It’s about breathing life into characters, giving them unique voices, and  setting the tone of a scene within your story. As a writer, you may find yourself constantly searching for new ways to express your characters’ emotions and actions through dialogue. To help you expand your vocabulary and enhance your writing, we’ve created this comprehensive list of dialogue tags, perfect for any writer looking to level up their craft.

But first, let’s dive into the importance of dialogue tags and how they can benefit your writing.

What are Dialogue Tags?

Dialogue tags, also known as speech tags, are phrases used to indicate who is speaking and how they are speaking in a story. These tags are essential for providing clarity, establishing tone, and conveying emotions and actions that may not be apparent from the dialogue alone.

Using a wide range of dialogue tags can enhance your writing and keep it from becoming monotonous. However, it’s important to strike a balance—too many unique tags can be distracting, while too few can leave your reader feeling unengaged.

Now, let’s explore the long list of examples of different types of dialogue tags for writers.

Basic Dialogue Tags

Basic dialogue tags are simple and unobtrusive. They keep the focus on the dialogue itself and are ideal for everyday conversations. Here are some common examples:

Dialogue Tags Indicating Volume

These tags help convey the loudness or quietness of a character’s speech, adding an extra layer of emotion and context to the conversation.

Dialogue Tags Denoting Emotion

Emotional dialogue tags allow you to show how a character is feeling, whether it’s happiness, sadness, anger, or any other emotion.

Dialogue Tags Signifying Tone

Tone-based dialogue tags help convey the manner in which a character is speaking, from sarcastic to serious, and everything in between.

Dialogue Tags Showing Speed and Rhythm

These tags illustrate the speed and rhythm of a character’s speech, providing insight into their thought process and emotional state.

Dialogue Tags Indicating Action

Action-based dialogue tags help to paint a vivid picture of a character’s movements and gestures, enhancing the overall scene.

Dialogue Tags Expressing Confidence or Uncertainty

Use these tags to convey a character’s level of certainty or confidence in their speech.

Dialogue Tags for Relaying Information

These tags are ideal for moments when characters are sharing information or knowledge with one another.

Dialogue Tags for Questioning and Probing

When characters are inquisitive or seeking answers, use these dialogue tags to emphasize their curiosity.

• interrogated

Dialogue Tags for Persuasion and Suggestion

These tags are perfect for showcasing characters’ attempts to persuade, convince, or offer suggestions to others.

• recommended

Dialogue Tags Reflecting Agreement or Disagreement

Use these tags to express a character’s agreement or disagreement with other characters in the story.

• acknowledged

Dialogue Tags for Surprise and Realization

Capture moments of surprise or sudden realizations with these dialogue tags.

How to Use Dialogue Tags in Your Writing

Overusing unique dialogue tags can be distracting and detract from the overall story. Instead, focus on using the most appropriate tags for each situation and striking a balance between variety and simplicity. Here are some questions to ask yourself that will help you determine if a dialogue tag enhances a scene.

• What is the overall tone of the scene? How would the chosen dialogue tag contribute to building the tone throughout the scene?
• Does the dialogue tag provide additional context or clarification to the reader about the scene or the characters? Is it redundant to something that is already obvious given the dialogue or the context?
• Does the Dialogue Tag distract from the message that the character is sending to the other people in the context?
• Can the reader interpret the sentence with or without the dialogue tag the same way?

By contemplating these questions writers can determine which dialogue tags are appropriate for each situation. In creating a balance between clarity and variety, the dialogue tags will add depth to the writing without overpowering the dialogue.

Having a diverse range of dialogue tags at your disposal can significantly enhance the quality of your writing, making it more engaging and vivid for your readers. By using this comprehensive list of dialogue tags, you can create conversations that convey emotion effectively and paint a clear picture of your characters and their interactions, taking your writing to new heights and creating captivating, immersive stories that will resonate with your readers.

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Dialogue Tags: What Are They and How To Use Them

by Kellie McGann | 154 comments

Writers encounter dialogue every day, but too often recently I've seen great stories ruined by choppy, incoherent, and straight-up weird dialogue. How can you use dialogue tags effectively in your stories to produce clear dialogue that zings?

Recently we talked about why dialogue is important , along with the seven critical roles it plays in stories. If you've played with dialogue for long, you quickly come up against some of the questions of how to properly format it on the page, what tags to use, and how to keep it from feeling redundant. Let's take a closer look at dialogue tags and how to use them.

What is a Dialogue Tag?

A dialogue tag, also known as an attribution, is a small phrase either before, after, or in the middle of actual dialogue that indicates the speaker. For example:

“Did you get my letter?” asked Katie .

The phrase “asked Katie” is the dialogue tag in the sentence.

How To Use Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags are found in three different places: before, after, or in the middle of dialogue. Depending on where the dialogue tags are, you use different punctuation and capitalization.

*We are using the rules for standard American English. UK English uses different punctuation rules .*

Tag Before the Dialogue

When dialogue tags are before the dialogue it looks like this:

Meghan asked , “A re you coming to my party ?”

How it works:

• Use a comma after the dialogue tag.
• If the dialogue is the beginning of a sentence, capitalize the first letter.
• End the dialogue with the appropriate punctuation (period, exclamation point, or question mark), but keep it INSIDE the quotation marks.

Tag After the Dialogue

When dialogue tags are used after the lines of dialogue it looks like this:

“Are you coming to my party ? ” Meghan asked .

“Are you coming to my party ? ” a sked Meghan . 

• Punctuation still goes INSIDE quotation marks.
• Unless the dialogue tag begins with a proper noun, it is not capitalized.
• End the dialogue tag with appropriate punctuation.

Tag in the Middle of the Dialogue

When dialogue tags are used in the middle of dialogue it looks like this:

“The car lights , ” s he explained , “ a ren't bright enough to drive at night.”

• A comma is used before the dialogue tag and goes INSIDE quotation marks.
• A comma is used after the dialogue tag, OUTSIDE of quotation marks, to reintroduce the dialogue.
• End the dialogue with the appropriate punctuation (period, exclamation mark, or question mark), but keep it INSIDE the quotation marks.

How Often Should You Use Dialogue Tags?

I came across this question recently in a writing group. How often do you need to tell the reader who is speaking? There are a few different rules to decide how often you use dialogue tags.

The most important thing to remember is:

If you are writing short dialogue , where each line is only a few words, you can use fewer dialogue tags. For example, this exchange has too many tags if there are only two people in the conversation:

“I'm trying to study,” Jen said. “For what?” Ben asked. “A test,” Jen answered. “Do you need something?” “I guess not,” said Ben.

In this case the dialogue tags are almost as long as the dialogue itself, and they become unnecessary and distracting . If the characters are previously introduced, the tags aren't needed. For example:

“I'm trying to study,” Jen said. “For what?” Ben asked. “A test. Do you need something?” “I guess not.”

The second example, which removes the the second set of dialogue tags, reads faster and is simpler. Simple is always better.

If you are writing with multiple (three or more) characters , use only enough dialogue tags to clearly indicate who is speaking.

If you are trying to insert action or description , you can use it as the dialogue tag. For example:

Jen looked down. “It's good to see you.” “Yeah, you too,” Ben said, biting the inside of his lip.

Notice how you can either include the dialogue tag (“Ben said”) or just use the action itself as the dialogue tag .

What About Internal Dialogue? 

What do you do if you're trying to show what a character is thinking? What about their internal dialogue? 

The industry standard is to eliminate the quotation marks and put the thoughts in italics. You may still need the dialogue tag if it makes the line clearer for readers. 

I hope she doesn't ask me to drive , he thought. 

The SAID Debate

There's a debate on how often to deviate from using a simple “said” to mark dialogue tags. One side argues that the only dialogue tags necessary are  said  and  asked . ( Joe is a believer in said .)

The other side, mainly composed of middle and high school English teachers around the world argue, “Said is Dead!”

The “Said Haters” argue that people do not simply say words; rather, they whisper ,  yell , remark,   argue, and so forth. They believe that using more descriptive words paints a clearer picture for the reader.

The “Pro-Said” Party believes that all the extra verbs are distracting to the reader. They believe that “said” is easily ignored, so your readers can keep their focus on the dialogue.

The best thing to do as a writer is to look at the industry standard for your genre or writing field. Make sure you notice how published writers are creating their dialogue tags, and use those as a model for your own practice. Can you deviate from those standards for a specific purpose? Of course, but know why you are doing it, and don't be surprised If it meets some resistance.

Which side are you on? Do you believe writers should only use “said” as a dialogue tag or should they vary their dialogue tag word choice?  Let us know in the comments .

For fifteen minutes , practice writing dialogue and follow the rules above. Experiment with said, and with placing dialogue tags in different spots. Be creative!

Once you finish, post your practice in the Pro Practice Workshop and leave feedback for other writers.

Kellie McGann

Kellie McGann is the founder of Write a Better Book . She partners with leaders to help tell their stories in book form.

On the weekends, she writes poetry and prose.

She contributes to The Write Practice every other Wednesday.

154 Comments

I do think we should use some variation, but I prefer simple words, such as said, asked, whispered, yelled, etc. I find longer, more complicated words more distracting, so I only use other words when said isn’t clear enough, such as when a person is whispering and shouting. I also occasionally use informed, repeated, and a few others.

Joseph, Sounds like a good rule to keep in mind. Simplicity is key.

^ Agree. From an English teacher, and author. Totally agree ^

Stick to said. It’s an attribution that generally doesn’t even register in a reader’s mind.

It does with me! I always notice when a writer repeats said too many times.

I agree with Karen. I too can tell when “said” is overly used. You dont really notice it though (at least at first), like Claudia said (there it is again, lol) – until the writer uses it too much, etc. – like in my post, here! 😀

Same with me. That’s why I think some variation can be nice.

I said that said is said too much. 🙂 Seriously, the reason English teachers coach students (often novice writers, many of whom are still learning the language) to avoid overusing said it because many do not yet have the fluency of strengthening the conversation with other conventions for imagery, etc. By nudging students toward other choices for saying said, it provides a means to assist with imagery through more specific language, which is an incredibly important skill. Additionally, many master writers use these tag lines to build character motivations and traits. It goes far beyond preference of word choice. Ezra Jack Keats in Peter’s Chair, illustrates for readers of all ages how Peter is gradually becoming more anxious over his blue baby items being painted pink. The tag lines go from “he thought” to “he whispered” and then from “he muttered” to “he shouted.” Teachers are not just coaching students toward writing skills, they are also helping readers analyze the purpose and intent of the decisions made by the writer to develop characters and build tension regarding the trouble (Mem Fox) in the story in order to better understand the story. At the end of the day, this conversation boils down to how knowledgeable, experienced, and flexible the writer is regarding using tag lines for multiple purposes as part of their craft.

Thank you for this great information.

For me said registers unpleasantly every time. I would much rather know how the words were spoken

I believe that there is a place for “said” just as much as “yell” , or any other variation. It really depends on what is happening in your story at the time, etc. – I dont believe it would be a good idea to only use “said” or to never use “said”. The word “said” as well as other expressions have their place – its up to us as writers to decide when and where that place is in our own stories, and then use whichever expressionary word the current dialogue calls for. 😀

If simple tags don’t work, try using none. Clever tags are distracting and amateur. I only need to know who is speaking, not how many words the author knows. Speaking of which, expressionary is not even a word. Way to ruin your own credibility.

The only credibility ruined here, is yours. Do you always end a comment towards another person (whom you’ve never met) with an arrogant comment? You must have many good friends……

If you don’t like my opinion (which is a month old), which was directed towards the article in general, then click your browser off. You have accomplished absolutely nothing by saying to me, “Way to ruin your own credibility.”….

…Other than proving to myself and others that you have a failing grade in internet etiquette. But I digress, because that’s what kids do. Go look up the meaning of “self-control” and “restraint” – you need it. Your parent’s obviously never taught you good manners.

Why are you starting a sentence with the word “but”?

You also put an apostrophe where there shouldn’t be one. Your parent’s obviously never taught you good manners. The word parents did not need an apostrophe.

My writing now includes a lot of dialog and I’m happy to say that I follow these rules with one exception. That being that if the tag in the middle is very long, I capitalize the first word within the second set of quotation marks, because it’s almost as if it’s a new piece of speech. Regards the said debate, I prefer to use more descriptive tags, when necessary, than just a rather simple and in my opinion nondescript said

That’s a great point about the middle dialogue tag! Thanks EmFairley.

Thanks Kellie! Another point is to keep the tags to a minimum if the conversation is only between two characters, as in my current work, except where descriptive tags are needed to denote change of tone or an action. I do occasionally use ‘he replied’, just to keep the reader on track. Hopefully, they will have become familiar with each character’s voice and will know who is speaking, but a subtle reminder is useful, and I find replied more subtle than said

“What the hell?” the curmudgeon grumbled.

“I lost all my dialogue,” he mumbled.

“Damn stupid software update in the middle of writing the practice,” followed by several expletives deleted.

“Crap, I thought it was updating from Yosemite to El Capitan,” the curmudgeon continued.

“But nooo. It updated Safari, and of course Safari can’t be open when it get’s updated so all that award winning dialogue get’s deleted when Safari closes.”

“Ha! Award winning? That’s a laugh,” exclaimed Amuse braying like a jackass.

“Hey, it’s deleted so maybe it was award winning dialogue,” affirms Muse.

“Yeah, like this old fart could write award winning anything,” interjected Amuse.

“Hey, give Gary credit. He does keep trying.”

“Oh yeah, he’s very trying, so trying he makes me tired,” Amuse fanes a yawn and stretch.

“If you don’t shut up I’m gonna deck you,” Muse threatens.

“Oh yeah, you and whose army?”

“Me and my army you little sh…” and Muse pounces on Amuse, resulting in both of them tumbling and rolling around Gary’s shoulders.

“Hey!” Interjected Gary. “Both of ya cool it. I gotta submit this before I lose it again.”

Sorry, but I found this to be a bit confusing and overly tagged. Is Gary the curmudgeon or some other character like Muse and Amuse? I think the 1st 5 lines should all be in a single paragraph… NMHO. 🙂

The over-tagging was deliberate, as well as the failure to use “said”, anywhere. I’m spider, but wanted to try not using said. Thanks for the comment. Muse and Amuse are my personal muse and anti-muse, who continually do battle.

I actually wondered if it was deliberate. I love that you have both a Muse and an Anti-muse.

Great practice Gary. Did this really happen? I really enjoy the names you give your characters. I think since I’ve seen your writing for a while now I was better able to understand it. You have a unique prose and style. Great job.

Yes it really did. I was all set to hit submit on an entirely different tact, when the dialogue popped up to upgrade. I thought I going from Yosemite to El Capitan, the OSes for a Mac, and knew it would take minutes to load, so I hit “do’od it”, and immediately lost Safari, because it was a Safari upgrade. This then was the result.

I love the banter between Muse and Amuse. Their colorful character really shines through the dialogue.

I like the descriptive tags better. I was attending my writer’s club during reading day. (we alternate between work days and readings days every Sunday at our local coffee house.) One of the younger readers read a story where he used descriptive tags and I loved his story. It felt very clear and I knew exactly how he intended each character to sound. I thought it was a great story and have been wanting to use them in my own writing but I’m always afraid of writing something “wrong.”

Descriptive tags, you have to use. Great that you can be in a writer’s club.

Everyone’s style is different, and I think you can be successful doing both. As long as it’s not super complicated and hard to read, descriptive tags can be a lot of fun. Don’t be afraid of writing something “wrong”. That will keep you from writing anything.

Joe entered the room. He knew instantly that something bad had happened. “What’s wrong?Why’s everyone so gloomy?” he inquired. Suzie, his wife, head down, answered, “Becky is dead.” He looked around at the seated women. His sisters nodded. “She was hit by a car!” said Delores. “You’re sure she’s dead?” “Of course we’re sure,” replied Mary, his other sister, “the doctor declared her dead an hour ago.” “Where did it happen?” he asked. “In front of the house,” responded Suzie, between her tears. “Weren’t you supposed to be watching her?” “I was watching her. She darted into the street when she saw Mary after she’d gotten off the bus. I couldn’t save her.” “It’s a mother’s duty to keep her child safe!” bellowed Joe. He burst into tears and collapsed.

I would agree with all of the above except “bellowed” – I think it would be stronger to simply use the “He burst…” as an action tag and skip the dialogue tag completely.

Jean, This is definitely some intense dialogue. Great examples and your dialogue tags look good. I’d love to see more action or description as well. It seems like the whole situation would be incredibly tense and I don’t get that strong feeling until the end. Great job Jean!

I needed to read about this very thing. I definitely use the “dialogue tag” in my writing but sometimes I don’t feel like using it and will write, “he said and she said,” with no dialogue tag used. Does that make sense? Please correct if I am wrong. Thanks.

This article was what I needed also. I especially needed the punctuation part.

LaCresha, “He said” and “She said” are dialogue tags themselves. You’re using dialogue tags without knowing it. Does that answer your question?

Good morning! And, thank you for your response. Ooops, I don’t think I made myself clear. Instead of using the dialogue tags when writing I will simply write, for example, well, he said that he didn’t need to go home. Instead of, “I said I didn’t need to go home.” So, I think I was writing in second person to keep from using quotation marks. I hope that was stated more clearly.

I meant in ” 3rd person.”

I am in favor of the descriptive tag, especially if it reveals something about the character or the situation. I agree that a poorly chosen tag is a distraction. However, using “said” when your characters are hiding from a gun-toting assailant whose position is unknown seems risky to me. Your characters had better be whispering.

I agree with your last two sentences. There definitely are places when you need to use a more descriptive dialogue tag.

Interesting point Andrea!

“I do not understand how a three year old can do all of this!” Marie shouted, gesturing at the crayon-scarred walls of the living room. “Marie, honey, what is this. I’m not there, I can’t see this.” “Greg, let me break it down for you. There is crayon all over the walls. Mason managed to climb on TOP OF THE SOFA and color the ENTIRE trim blue. There is marker all over the kitchen floor, and he broke a lamp.” “Marie,” Greg began, knowing he was about to venture into dangerous territory, “why was he able to do that?” Marie quietly put Greg on speaker. “Greg, are you trying to ask why I wasn’t watching him?” A cough followed by shuffling feet answered her. “I WAS GONE FOR FIVE, Greg, FIVE MINUTES! You get to go off to work, come home to a nice warm dinner, watch a T.V. show, and go to bed. You know what I get to do? I get to clean up spit, poop, food, do laundry, vacuum. I cant even go to the bathroom in peace! I told you, five minutes is all it took for him to do-” “Marie.” “- all of that, and now I have to clean it all up, and you’re at this conference-” “Marie.” “- I don’t think I can go another day alone with him. What?” “I’m coming home. I’m picking up ice cream, magic erasers, paper towels, and the biggest bottle of wine I can find. I’ll help you get the house in order, and then you can take a bath while I have some one-on-one with Mason. Okay?” Marie sighed and sat down. “Okay.”

Well done. I don’t think you need the exclamation point and the shouted tag however. One kind of implies the other, and “Marie gestured” carries the meaning well.

Ah, the frustration of parenthood. I managed to skip daddy go straight to granpa, when we could send them home. 🙂

Gary, I do agree with some of the exclamation points. I does that a lot myself and I’m trying to pay more attention by reading aloud as you mentioned to me. Lauren, this is great. I am able to know who is speaking. Thanks KEn

I like this and admire how you can take a simple, everyday situation and turn it into interesting dialogue. The only thing I’d suggest is to make it apparent early on that he’s over the phone. It’s a little unclear whether he’s over the phone, in another room, or just won’t get up to see, until pretty far into the scene.

That’s very good dialogue! I like the limited use of dialogue tags. Definitely helps me read it faster. You might be able to even exchange some of the names towards the middle/in to simply “she” or “he”.

Hi Lauren, I like your dialogue but I don’t understand that little dash.

I’m not sure how to do it, but it’s where her speech is cut off and picking up again after Greg interrupts her.

That is an em dash, and in Word is putting two hyphens after a word, then typing the next word. I found that when it’s next to a quotation mark, it skews the quotes to go the other direction, so I type a letter then quotes and hit space or enter, this gives me the proper punctuation. Ex. vvv

>> ” … I told you, five minutes is all it took for him to do–” “Marie.” “–all of that, and now I have to clean it all up, and you’re at this conference–” “Marie.” “–I don’t think I can go another day alone with him. What?” <<

Em dashes also need to be in the quotes where the person is interrupting, but I think in a fiction, the rule can be bent a little to improve flow of the dialogue.

I highly suggest the book "Punctuate It Right", which can be found on Amazon for cheap.

I would use an ellipsis … instead of an em dash

I’m a “said” person with exception and that is when too much text would get in the way otherwise, one might use a more descriptive tag.

I generally favor said-&-asked…especially in the book I’m writing now (my characters lie *a lot* so there’s plenty of 3rd person omniscient counter dialog). But I use descriptive tags w/o a 2nd thought to clarify & animate quick exchanges. From tonight’s work:

“So the cops shot your old pal Tito last night…big shootout, I hear.” “Tito?” Tito was in jail. Bugadoy had visited him more than once when he went to see Jun. And Tito was unlikely to be out on the loose without Jun. “One of the cops lives around here—was talking about it this morning. Big shootout!” “Where?” “Cavite, somewhere…” The barber was always like this—last minute topics—make you pull more out of him right at the time he was brushing you off and working the last of the whiteness of the talc into your smooth, dry skin. Bugadoy wanted to punch him. “Big shootout?” he asked instead. “Who else—is Tito in a gang—working for the Sangleys?” “Don’t know,” he untied the barber’s bib and snapped it to one side a couple of times to clear the trimmings. “They’re still sorting it all out—was supposed to just be a raid—turned out more like a war, the guy said.” The barber, having finished his closing remarks, awaited his reward—in money and maybe in shocked response—but all Bugadoy gave him was money.

“Psst, psst!” Two quick, urgent hisses—two cat-spits from a dark hollow. Bugadoy didn’t break stride, but tensed. “Psst!” Again, from behind him, the street call of the shady character. Turning to face, he saw it was Nandy, from the Strong Arm yard—Jun’s caretaker. Looking away, he marched ahead to his Pajero and unlocked the passenger door before turning back to the ragged-looking little man. “Get in,” he said, swinging the door open and striding around to the driver’s side.

Very intriguing dialogue here! Does a great job of drawing me into the story. There’s a lot of action in here which does a great job bringing the reader along.

Personally I don’t like using said at all or asked or any ‘tag’. I prefer to use actions before after in between dialog to indicate who is talking. **** A knock came at the door I’d left open. A familiar voice called out, “Nox, you here?”

I smiled to myself, and my heart started to race. I shouted from the bathroom. “Yeah, come on in to the disaster area.”

Dorian walked in and stood in the doorway to the bathroom and leaned against the frame. He watched me as I finished folding the towels and put them in the linen closet. “Seems my room was searched rather throughly.”

Dorian gave me a sympathetic yet strained smile, “Mine wasn’t nearly so bad. But then again I’m certain that I was treated rather kindly due to the circumstances.”

I frowned but when I looked up to see Dorian’s face he was still putting on a feigned smile. But the smile quickly faded and left small lines of worry that etched into his beautiful face. Death among the Venatori was not uncommon, but this was a tragedy.

I grinned at Dorian trying to lighten the mood as I leaned against the bathroom door, it gave a little under my weight and I had to shift my feet ungraceful like. “I’m sure they were down right nice to you.”

I waved Dorian into the studio proper. There was no point standing in the bathroom, where my mind was wandering to various things I’d like to be doing. Things I rapidly pushed from my mind. “I’m starving. I need to go get something to eat. If you don’t mind coming with, we can talk on the way over, over dinner and find someplace to finish talking about what I see.”

Dorian nodded, “I think that will work. I know a nice little place, if you don’t mind.”

Alicia, this is very interesting, I love all of the visuals you give. Keep up the good work!

I spend most of my writing avoiding ‘he said/ she asked’, but sometimes you can’t escape them. The example below is from my WIP: Corrine sat gazing out the window, “What ever happened to that doctor you told me about?” She turned back to Corrine, “What, from BMC?” “Yeah.” “Dr. McCarthy,” Again she saw his face, every detail. She heard his voice as he claimed God was cruel. For some reason she could remember it all. “I don’t know,” she said finally, “He left, and I was released the next day. I don’t know where he is. I barely know who he is.” Corrine cocked her head, “So you never tried to figure it out?” Alyssa shook her head. “What exactly did he say to you the last time you saw him?” Corrine leaned forward. Alyssa shrugged, “That God was cruel, and He took people’s lives. I think there was something else going on in him besides what he let on.” “Probably,” Corrine smiled, “Well, meybe you affected him. Maybe he’ll come to the Lord because of what you said,” “I don’t know,” she shook her head, “The way he was talking… Well, it would have been different if he was an athiest, but he does believe in God. And he hates Him.” “I can’t understand that.” “Me neither,” Alyssa sighed, “I just wish I’d had the chance to say more. It was only a couple of minutes, and I don’t think my words could have impacted him enough for him to change.” Corrine leaned back in her chair and stared at her, “Well, you forget that they’re not your words,” she turned to her and grinned, “And who knows? Maybe that’s one of the ‘things not seen’ you’re always talking about.”

Reagan, This is a great conversation. Your punctuation and dialogue tags look great. You might even try using fewer tags and see if that still works. Great job!

Thanks, Kellie! This is one of the things I always struggled with. This is part of my novel, the final draft I’ll be sending to print soon, so I am so relieved to know I’m doing it right! Glad you liked it, and thanks for the post!

I’m so glad about this particular prompt because I submitted my short story in the workshop about a couple of weeks ago. I have Gary and MC to thank for critiquing that story for me. (somebody once did it for me). I have sense a while corrected some of the errors that Gary had pointed out. Now, this prompt touch on some of the same critique. I have tried not to use She said. Said Betty. I had gotten use to the introduction of the characters and when they speak, I assumed that the reader would know who was and was not speaking. However, I do believe in variation and I might try to use that a little more.

This is an example, Two people talking. Zachary leaned on the wall with his arms folded. “If you were going to dump me, why didn’t you just….just…” Julie exhaled, “Zachary, I can’t believe that you didn’t see this coming.” “Julie, Let me finish what I am trying to say!” He sat down next to her. “You’re interrupting me. You never give me a chance to say anything.” They grew quiet. “I’m sorry, Zach. I wasn’t aware that I did that.”

Should I have said. Julie said,, “I’m sorry.” etc. Either way, I still learned a lot from this prompt. Maybe I should say I hope that I learned. Thank you all KEN

Now, I might not have done this correctly, but I wanted show that Julie interrupted.

My rule is to use tags, and mostly I use “said”, to clarify whose talking. In that case, you use Zach in Julie’s sentence, so in my opinion the tag would not be needed.

Kenneth, You were definitely successful in showing that she kept interrupting him. I think it’s also because your character repeated that a few times. I often like interrupted dialogue like: “If you were going to dump me, why didn’t you just….just—” “Zachary, I can’t believe that you didn’t see this coming.” Julie exhaled.

I think the dash often shows without telling that the person was interrupted. Great job here though!

I try to stick with “said”, mostly, and substitute body language that will express how the person is feeling. For example:

Ben slammed his fist on the table. “Carol, don’t ignore me!”

But I’m not entirely against using a dialogue tag that describes the emotion if the situation warrants it. 🙂

Using body language in place of tags seems to create such rich moments! Great example with Ben slamming his fist.

A Cooper, That sounds like a good way to express how someone is feeling! I think the dialogue tags really depends on the tone as well. Great example.

Thanks. I’m learning a lot from other very generous writers, such as the folks here at thewritepractice!

I have used all three examples. I find in short dialogues it can be boring to read “said” all of the time. I also believe that using other dialogue tags can make the conversation more interesting. Examples: “What is your interest in this matter?” Tom asked. Helen said, “You are welcome.” “I think your answer is not entirely right,” the instructor explained, “Do you know where the mistake is?”

Juanita, It’s definitely fine to switch it up. I think it depends on the style and tone you are using in your writing as well. Great examples.

Kellie, you messed up with your quotation:

“The car lights,” she explained, “aren’t bright enough to drive at night.“

You put a beginning quotation where there should have been an ending one.

I am disappointed in you.

Now let’s get creepy

Kellie, tonight I will be a sunflower field. Let yourself inside of me.

It’s an auto-formatting issue. Thanks for pointing that out, don’t worry, we fixed it.

What a response! Such professionalism! But i thought we were amongst friends here. Girl, you could have told me to f off, i wouldn’t have cared. But the kindness is appreciated Kellie Kellie. What a name! Kellie Kellie. You must love that name! What a woman! Wild woman you are kellie! Wild as a chimpanzee.

I love dialogue. LOVE IT. Of course, my upcoming novel, COFFEE BAR, started out as a play, so it all began with dialogue….

“What’s so bad about your job?” I ask. “You don’t understand,” Sully says, waving his free hand. “Yesterday, my boss told me to fire his secretary.” “So?” “It’s horrible,” he whines. “It is?” “Yes!” His voice cracks and two of the cafe patrons turn and give him that “Is-this-guy-a-serial-killer” look. “Okay,” I say in a hush, “it’s horrible. Tell me why.” “I know it’s childish and stupid – but that’s how life is sometimes. Right?” “Right.” “So yesterday, my boss hands me termination paperwork for his secretary. But I can’t do it.” “Why not?” “She likes me,” he proudly declares. “She likes you?” “Yes.” “How do you know?” “I know.” “How?” He shrinks, if only a little. “It’s childish.” I snatch his mug of decaf. “Spill the beans or I’m dumping this out.” His face screws up in surprise. “What?” “Tell me, Sully!” I say, holding his cup precariously in the air. “I am not a patient man!” “Okay, fine!” he cries. “She complimented my tie!” “That’s it?” “Yes! Now give it back!” I parachute the mug back into his pasty hands. “What kind of tie was it?” His eyes flit about, leaping with anxiety. “I don’t know – it was gold, with flecks of silver and brown and a swirly pattern – it was a tie, okay?”

Ha, “”Is-this-guy-a-serial-killer” look. I know that look, great description! This is such an interesting encounter, the dialogue suggests that these two know each other well. I like how playful it is. Great job!

Thanks! I feel that the best stories are born in the dialogue between characters. If conflict isn’t coming from character relationships, then it probably isn’t authentic.

A great resource I stumbled upon with regard to dialogue is The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi. Very helpful.

This is something I struggled with when I first started writing. I love dialogue, but my readers got confused over who said what at times, plus some of the finer grammatical points still escape me. Thanks Kellie!

“Dude, are you sure about this?” I asked. Sal shrugged. “Yeah, I checked the map. It’s the trail to the north.” “Alrighty then,” I said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” “Please. I’ve been hiking way longer than you, I can read a map.” She started to hike, saying “Oh, and don’t call me ‘dude’. I’m not one of your bros.” “Yeah, sure.” I pull out a Clif Bar and open the wrapper. “You get out here often?” “Not this park, no, but my Dad got me involved in Scouts when I was pretty young. I’ve hiked a lot.” “I thought Girl Scouts just sold cookies.” I bit into the Clif Bar, peanut butter and chocolate saturating my taste buds. “Not Girl Scouts, Venturing.” I swallowed and asked, “What’s that?” “It’s a part of Boy Scouts. They’re co-ed and they do more high adventure stuff. Backpacking, rafting, that sort of thing.” “Hah! What kind of girl joins Boy Scouts?” I took another bite. She stopped at the first switchback. “The kind that can whoop your butt on these trails.” I shook my head. “Please.” She punched my arm. “You wanna bet? First one to the peak decides what we do for dinner.” I smiled. “I didn’t realize we were doing dinner. I’ll take that bet.” Sal opens her water bottle and takes a sip. “You want any before we start? I know you’re out.” “Nah, I’m good.” “Hey, I’ve got a question for you.” She said, taking a sip of water. “Shoot.” “You’re the biggest bro I’ve ever met. Partying hard every chance you get, I see you at the gym whenever I’m there, and don’t forget about those polos and Sperrys.” “So?” “So why’d you ask me out? I’m totally not your type.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, I…why’d you say yes? I’m definitely not your type either.” Sal shrugged. “I don’t know. Let’s talk about it at Freddie’s tonight. Best barbecue in town.”

“Freddie’s? No way, I’ll make way better barbecue.” “You can not be a good cook. Now I’ve gotta win.” She sprinted up the trail. “I’ll make the best damn ribs you’ve ever had!” I shouted, hot on her heels.

Cheers, Kieran! I thoroughly enjoyed you dialogue. I love dialogue, too, and could read an entire story with just dialogue. I would put an ‘and’ in the sentence; ‘I’ve been hiking longer than you (and) I can read a map.

Kieran, I know what you mean, I was desperate to figure out these rules! Your dialogue is good and tells an interesting story.

The only thing you have to be careful about, (and I do too) is to watch your tenses. You have some present and some past tenses throughout the dialogue. It’s often better to stick with one. (You have mostly past, just a few present tenses)

Present: Sal opens her water bottle and takes a sip. Past: She punched my arm.

Great job, can’t wait to see more of your writing!

I like as few tags as possible. Rather than being told someone shouted something or argued something, I’d prefer that the writer describes the character’s body language. I think this is much more descriptive than simply replacing said:

‘I don’t care,’ Bill shouted. ‘I’m not talking about this anymore,’ argued Sharon.

Bill slammed his palm on the table. ‘I don’t care!’ Sharon didn’t flinch this time, her body was too rigid for that. She lifted her chin. ‘I’m not talking about this anymore.’

Also, I think writers need to be careful when using action in a dialogue tag. Some things you can’t do at the same time as talking, such as biting the inside of your lip!

Louise, these are great points. Great examples as well!

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Thanks Louise. I like the second way in which you show action with dialogue. I’ll try it when I wwrite part of my story today.

She nodded her head in agreement. “Fewer dialogue tags and more action just reads better.”

‘In agreement’ is redundant and unnecessary. Why else would she be nodding?

This point is interesting to me. Yes, it is redundant, but it also reflects the way good storytellers sometimes speak. Complete concision is extremely important in academic writing, and I’d say very important in fiction writing, but I think there will always be exceptions. You don’t want to sound like an efficient robot. Sometimes an adverb or a clarification helps give it a human feel.

By that token, “unnecessary” is redundant to “redundant”. Neither case is a cardinal sin.

Good catch!

That’s what I generally do when I am writing dialogue. I prefer that when I’m reading, too. I think it adds a lot more emotion to the scene.

Louise Lilley, I didn’t realize I liked less tags and more action until I read your examples! I felt like I was in the room with Bill and Sharon with the second examples compared to the first example where I felt like I was just reading words 🙂 thanks!

Newbie here, late to the party, but here is my go at it.

Jenna glided the milkshake up to her quivering lips, “how long do you think you’ll be gone?” Mark tried his best at sounding brave, “It will be like I was never missing in the first place, by the time I get back,” his now shaking, ” You’ll almost be due then we’ll be able to start our family together.”

Did I get that right?

McFrakin, Good job with punctuation inside of the quotation marks, and descriptive dialogue tags. There are just a few things we need to look at:

In the first sentence, you need to capitalize the H in “how” because it is a complete sentence.

In the second sentence, the dialogue tag is “his now shaking”. Do you mean his hands? Voice?

Also the “you’ll” doesn’t need to be capitalized because it is part of the previous sentence.

Great start!

From my perspective, yes, as far as action tags go. You might consider showing us what “tried his best at sounding brave” looks like, as you did with Jenna in the line above. You didn’t need to tell us she was nervous, her actions showed us.

What about says instead of said? “Pick up the phone, Dad, oh please!” Martha says as she watches the ambulance drive away with her mother.

S.M. Sierra, I think it just depends on the tense you’re using. If you’re using present tense, then you can use “says” for sure. Just make you’re keeping the tenses consistent. (I’m really bad at that.)

I agree very much about variation. I tend to use my ear a lot when I’m writing, and find rhythm very important. I like to keep to ‘said’, or asked’, and keep as few of those. I do use actions a lot, or a sentence such as ‘Toby was unimpressed: “…”‘ I like to bear in mind about words like ‘shouted’, that you should be able to tell from the character of the dialogue that it was shouted–again, if you’ve really ‘heard’ the shouting, so should the reader without being told. I’ve just read a bit further down the discussion, and I love the warning about ‘said, as he bit his lower lip.’ It reminds me of another warning I read once about using tags like. “No,” he hissed.

“You really don’t have to do this.” Jeremiah said, shutting the trunk of the car lock. “You know that right?” Our gazes meet. His eyes were sad and gloomy. I feel a pang of guilt filter in my body, igniting me all over.

I took in a deep breath, and shook my head, “It’s not that easy Jere.”

“What is?”

“You.”

I feel the current of the wind gush against my bare skin. I held my breath. He took my hands, cupping it with both if his.

“Please don’t do this.”

“I am.” I say, breaking away from his grip, wiping the stinging tears away from my face.

“Violet please?” He says. I say No and started the car. I wanted to drive away, and cry with the moon and the stars I wanted to get away. Away from him.

But I couldn’t because I knew I’d never leave him. Not ever.

I jerk the driver’s seat open but before I could, he got himself in the passenger’s seat.

“Well If you won’t stay I’m going with you.”

“Fine.” I muttered and ignite the car alive. It roared in response. Not having a single clue where I’d end up driving to.

“I’m scared Vi.” Jeremiah’s voice cracks. “I’m scared that if I’ll let you go back home to Connecticut you’d never come back.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

“How can I be so sure?”

I bite back the tears. He was right. I was lying. I said nothing in response.

“I have to.” I exhale, I look to him and I watch as his adam’s apple bobble up and down. please don’t cry please don’t cry please just please don’t cry.

“I’m sorry.” I say, unlocking the car for him.

GloomyMermaid, this dialogue did a great job of pulling me into the story. You had me thinking, “No, don’t leave!”

That being said, there was only one part I got tripped up on. In the middle: “Violet please?” He says. I say No and started the car.

It seems like the “I say No and started the car” should be dialogue, not just a normal sentence? I think the tone you establish with the back and forth dialogue is really good, so I’d change this to fit the flow.

I really wanted to read more though! This story is super intriguing!

thank you so much 🙂

An excerpt from my story I’m currently writing; this part is yet to be properly edited: (please,go easy on me, I’m only 20 and still learning.)

– “It’s nice to meet you all.” I say. They gasp at me. “You’re British? She’s British!” The one called Grace states. “Say something else!” She instructs me. I laugh, “Being British really isn’t that cool…” They all grin to themselves. “Are you British too, Reagan?” Grace asks her. “No, American.” Reagan states with an amused tone. They all look slightly disappointed. “It’s only an accent. What’s the big deal?” I ask. “It’s an awesome accent, makes you sound so distinct!” Grace exclaims. “Now I’m going to take them away because you’ve all made a fantastic first impression.” Hannah says sarcastically, but with a warm giggle. She grabs mine and Reagan’s hands and rushes us away from them. “Sorry, I didn’t know they’d be so strange…” I grin, “They were nice. Apart from Sam. He’s a bit… odd.” Hannah giggles, “Sam’s harmless, he’s just crude.” I take note. Poppy comes over to us. “Well, what did you think of our gang?” She asks with a huge smile on her face. “Elizabeth was just saying that she thinks Sam is odd.” Poppy laughs, “Oh I knew he’d make a standout impression on you,” she inspects her nails for a second before looking back at us, “trust me, deep down he’s a real sweetheart.” Reagan scoffs, “I’ll believe that when I see it,” but then she flicks her hair as she peeks to glance at him, “Is he single?” Hannah and Poppy exchange knowing looks. “Babe, he’s been single for years.” Poppy exclaims.

Beth, all of your punctuation and dialogue tags look great. I also think you did a good job with the number of dialogue tags you used, just enough to be clear who is talking within a large group. Can’t wait to see more!

Thank you Kellie 🙂 Honestly that’s what I struggle with the most, and for some very odd reason, I created a bunch of characters who most likely will hang around in one big group all the time. Hopefully I’ll find my way around it!

You are joking, right?

I’m with you. The punctuation is far from correct

Accents, we all have one. Y’all, you all, or youse. Always wondered what I sound like to folk from afar.

Beth, Good for you starting out so young!! Most of your excerpt is correctly punctuated, and there are also a few errors. I’m going to make a couple of corrections – better to learn them now and get into the habit… One of the easiest ways to know if you should be using a period or a comma, is to say the dialog tag by itself to see if it is a complete sentence. For instance, in a couple of places there should be a comma instead of a period. And it also let’s you know if the next word should be capitalized. “It’s nice to meet you all,” I say. (a comma because ‘I say.’ isn’t a complete sentence by itself – it is connected to the dialog..) “You’re British? She’s British!” the one called Grace states. (lowercase because ‘the one called Grace states.’ isn’t a complete sentence by itself – it is connected to the dialog.) There are a couple of others – see if you can spot them. Best of luck!!

I definitely disagree that ‘said is dead’. You can pain a clearer picture by actions instead of using variations of said. As a reader, I also find it simpler and less distracting.

Alex, that’s a great point. I love the simpler and less distracting writing.

Thanks Kellie, for this revision on dialogue tags and punctuation. I, for one, appreciate a constant reminder on writing correctly.

Here’s some dialogue I had with my husband, Jules and son Andy, today. I called Andy on my mobile phone. When he answered I asked, “At what time will you be here?” “At about twelve thirty. What’s for lunch?” “I made meat sauce. Do you prefer to have it with short pasta or spaghetti?” I asked. “Always short pasta. Spaghetti’s messy.” “OK. We’ll cook the pasta when you get here.” Jules, my husband entered the kitchen while I was saying ‘bye to Andy. “Hang on,” he said, “I want to ask him something.” I handed him my phone.

“Hi! I was thinking of making you onion soup with crunchy bread croutons. What d’ya say?” “Thanks Pa. Suppose you make it on Saturday? My wife adores onion soup.” “OK,” he said, “see you for lunch,” and handed me my phone.

The dialogue above isn’t interesting but is it correct? I noticed I only used ‘said’ and’ asked’. I use other words when I write a story, such as exclaimed, commented, remarked, hissed, laughed, etc: etc: to give the dialogue a punch.

Lilian, the punctuation and dialogue tags look great. And I think you’ve made me hungry. Great job!

Thanks Kellie. Come have a meal, any day.

This reminds me of when we go to my grandparents’ house 🙂 The spare use of dialogue tags made the conversation much more realistic.

Kelly, great post and good submissions and comments! The use of dialog tags is much a matter of choice, but I think it can be used much of the time to eliminate boring narrative. Example: The two men were discussing the merits of a mountain retreat in Colorado. John had served a tour in Korea as a U.S. marine. He had gone through the Chosin Reservoir tragedy. Jack had also served in the marines, and had landed on a mine and recovered, but lost his sight. John wished Mouse would hurry. He was sick of Jack’s male bovine defecation.

Changed to dialog, it might sound like this:

“Jack, why in hell would two ex-marines, in the twilight of our lives, want to buy a damned mountain cabin in Colorado? You’re nuts, Brother-in-law!” John said. I had me enough of cold weather at the Chosin Reservoir when I served in Korea.”

“Baloney, John! You’re a damned wet blanket – no more fun like you used to be. Don’t forget, I left part of me in Korea, too, when that damned mine exploded and left me without eyes. Get a life, already. What would it hurt you to own a cabin in the Rockies?”

John was relieved when Mouse Babineaux approached there table.

“Glad I found you guys,” Mouse said as he pulled up a chair and sat.

“Hey Mouse, good to see you again,” John said.

“Simon Babineaux, you old bastard, what are you up to?” Jack asked. “I haven’t seen you since that time you had to leave the party because of everybody teasing you about getting caught in New Iberia with your pants down. You were really frustrated that night.”

“Jeez, Jack, if I’d known you’d bring that up, I’d have stayed home!”

I think we’ve learned everything in the dialog that was said in boring narrative. John and Jack are brothers-in-law, they’re elderly, and apparently have conflicting views on the cabin. We also learn that Mouse is a friend whose first name is Simon. (I did this quickly, so please ignore formatting. :-))

I suggest anyone who wants to learn about dialog, tags, and use, should read Elmore Leonard and the late Robert B. Parker, two of my favorite authors.

I’m in the process of launching my fifth novel and having lots of fun! Please visit my web site for bibliography. http://jamesorytheall.com Again, my compliments on a good post!

James, Thanks so much for your encouragement and info on dialogue tags. I agree that dialogue is so much more interesting than plain text. Sometimes I find myself skipping paragraphs, just to get back to what the characters are saying. Congrats on your fifth novel!

If we only use ‘said ‘, we are doing another no-no, i.e. Repetition. We are told to watch out for this, even to the extent of checking that words are not repeated under each other. I believe that varying the tag is fine as long as it isn’t too obtrusive.

Good point, I think it depends on the authors voice and tone. There’s nothing wrong with a little variance.

Oh, and I’m a born Brit and educated In England. I followed the link to Grammarly to look at the differences between American rules and British rules. I have *never* seen ‘gypsy’ spelled ‘gipsy’, and as to dialogue punctuation, as far as I am concerned, like American punctuation, it goes inside the quotes.

“Silence is important.”

“Did I say it wasn’t?” She glared the words rather than said them. “I know you like silence. I know you value silence. The problem is, I don’t. I like noise. I like things to happen. You just don’t get that. You never have.”

“That’s right. I never have.”

“But what does that mean?”

She raised her eyebrows expectantly. “How can this relationship work without a little communication. We need to express ourselves in order to be healthy. I need us to express ourselves. I need you to do that.”

The weight between them was too much to carry. Something that was once normal, accepted, cherished even, is no longer so. The cruelty of time is that it warps, twists, and confuses feelings that were once pure into something decidedly not.

“We have been together 40 years.”

“Yes.”

“I thought that would be enough.” His shoulders are slumped, exhausted from the same communication over and over, the same needs and desires expressed.

“Well, it isn’t.”

I absolutely adore the “She glared the words rather than said them.” It’s such a vivid image. I’m a little curious to know who the second speaker is, but the dialogue is still interesting and comprehensible without any information on him. Great job!

Haylee, You did a really great job here! You avoided all traditional dialogue tags and used actions! I liked it, very interesting. The only thing to be careful with actions is sometimes it’s hard to tell if the person who said the dialogue was also doing the action, or if they were responding to the words with their actions. Great job and great tone!

I’ve heard that said doesn’t register, and people will overlook it.

I don’t. I can’t. A writer puts too many saids in a row, and it starts to bug the crap out of me.

Furthermore, the classics don’t seem to follow this rule. It seems to have sprung up more recently.

But it’s not a mountain I’m going to die on. At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter much–as long as you aren’t using completely ridiculous things and making it obvious that you’re AVOIDING said.

Karen, I was checking out some classics actually while I wrote the post and it’s interesting, some of them use said, and actually most of them use dialogue tags sparsely. Thanks for your thoughts!

My perception may be influenced by my recent read-through of the Oz books–lots of “retorted” and “inquired” and the like.

But I know “rules” change with the times. “Head hopping” is a big no-no now, but when Mitchell did it in Gone with the Wind it wasn’t so much.

Karen, I agree. I can’t keep up with all the changes. 🙂

Oh, who needs narrative, anyway? If you give the characters distinctive enough personalities and speech patterns, and contrive some way for them to describe their environment, and you have them refer to each other by name (which has the side benefit of giving a relaxed, casual air to a conversation), you can totally cut all the dialogue tags. And everything else, in fact.

The following practice has an overwhelming preponderance of curse words; if that’s not your bag, don’t read it.

“I hate the city this time of year.”

“You hate the city every time of year, Jack.”

“Yeah, but it’s especially bad right now; all gray and cold and soggy and shit. Nothing but slush in the streets, squishing under my shoes and all; look at this, man, these are good shoes.”

“That’s because it’s four o’clock in the fuckin’ morning and the machines ain’t been around to sweep it off. You shouldn’t wear good shoes for stuff like this.”

“Well, Dan, I’d love to wear my shitty shoes, but I left my shitty shoes under your girlfriend’s bed.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too. Is that it?”

“Yeah, looks like. You ready?”

“The fuck you mean if I’m ready? It’s a fuckin’ gas station. It’s not like it’s a bank or some shit.”

“Man, you could mess up a gas station worse than I could mess up a bank.”

“Yeah, whatever, motherfucker … a’ight, here we go. Ladies first, Dan.”

“Okay, nobody move! This is a hold-up!”

“Get down on the floor, motherfuckers! That’s right! All ya’ll, get down! Go down! Flat, bitch! Flat with your hands on your fuckin’ head! Anybody moves gets shot!”

“Please do not shoot! Take the money, it is in the cash register!”

“Did you just reach for a gun, motherfucker?”

“No! I did not reach for a gun! I turned off the gas line, sir! It is standard company policy, sir! I am cooperating!”

“Dan! I think this motherfucker just reached for a gun!”

“What? What kind of motherfucker is gonna be stupid enough to try and reach for a gun with an AK in his face?”

“This motherfucker, apparently.”

“No! Please! Do not shoot! Take the money! Take whatever you would like and go! I will not call the police!”

“The police? Dan, did you hear us mention the police?”

“Didn’t mention the police, Jack.”

“You didn’t mention the police, and I didn’t mention the police—well, then who told you anything about the police?”

“No one told me about the police!”

“Well, if nobody told you *about* the police, why the fuck you gonna stand there *talking* about the police, unless you thinking about *calling* the police?”

“I am not going to call the police!”

“DAN! There he goes again! Talking about calling the police on us and shit!”

“I don’t think he’s cooperating, Jack.”

“Well, as a matter-of-fucking-fact, I don’t think he’s cooperating, either.”

“I am cooperating!”

“You’re cooperating? How do we know you ain’t gonna call the cops the second we leave?”

“I think we should shoot him, Jack.”

“I’m starting to think that same way.”

“No! Please!”

“Well, Jack, I’ll tell you what. You head to the back of the store and get us some cold ones, and if this greasy-haired motherfucker here doesn’t give me any kind of crap by the time you get back, maybe—maybe—we’ll let him go.”

“Take all you want!”

“Okay, Dan. But if I come back and he’s giving anybody any kinda problems … I’ll shoot his swarthy ass my self.”

“Did you just blink at me?”

“I *said*, did you just *blink* at me?”

What? Yes!”

“Did I give you *permission* to blink?”

“DID I give you PERMISSION to BLINK?”

“Then why did you blink at me?”

“I do not know! Please, don’t shoot me, I have two children at home, and a—”

“Jesus, he shot him!”

“The fuck the rest of ya’ll talking ’bout? Keep your fuckin’ heads down!”

“You ready to go, Jack?”

“Yeah. You got the money?”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

Obviously, this creates a very weird rhythm; were I inclined to edit it later, there’d have to be a whole host of changes to maintain the tension. However, for a less tense situation—a casual, postprandial discussion, for example—the rhythm issue is much less pronounced.

Nianro, This is a really great example. I like the stylistic approach. I agree that the tension could be even stronger, but this is a fun example of no dialogue tags.

I really enjoyed this article.

This discussion has been very interesting. So many different points of view. No one, as far I can see has mentioned dialogue to oneself. What is the best way to do that? In some writing article that I read, it stated that there should not be any of….. eg – she said to herself – dialogue. Is that correct? How would the reader know the person was talking to themselves? I am busy trying to write my first novel, and have ‘self-talk’ in italics as I am not sure of the correct way to do it. Any ideas????

I also use italics for self-talk. It seems to be Ok.

Thank you for your reply Lilian. I am glad that I seem to be on the right track at least.

If a writer need something more than ‘said’, they should show it in the action that demonstrate how the speaker feels.

This is a great guide for writing dialogue tags! One issue, though, is that this: “A comma is used after the dialogue tag, OUTSIDE of quotation marks, to reintroduce the dialogue.” is not actually correct in all cases–it only applies when the dialogue tag is interrupting mid-sentence.

“You are a complete moron,” Sarah tells David fiercely, “and I am ashamed that I ever dated you.” The full sentence Sarah is saying is “You are a complete moron, and I am ashamed that I ever dated you,” so the dialogue tag has to be offset by commas.

A good example of when not to have that second comma is in your example of too many dialogue tags in short dialogue:

* “A test,” Jen answered, “Do you need something?”

This makes it seem like Jen is saying “A test, Do you need something?” rather than “A test. Do you need something?” To convey the latter dialogue instead:

“A test,” Jen answered. “Do you need something?”

I’m wondering about combining tags with other elements.

“I’m ready,” said George impatiently, waving his keys.

It seems clumsy but less clumsy than…

“I’m ready,” said George. He waved his keys.

I’ve discovered it’s easier to reduce tagging by giving someone a distinctive speech characteristic. For example, two men speaking makes it awkward (and useless) to say “he said” repeatedly.

“After the zoo we can get ice cream,” said Henry. “Yum yum chocolate chip sweetie!” (Reader knows this is Daniel) “OK.”

Why does the advice to “Only ever use ‘said’ as a dialogue tag” tempt me to write a story whose main characters have the last name Said? “Mr. Said I told you what I said before,” Mrs. Said said. “I don’t care if you don’t like calling each other by our last name. Its something custom demands that we do Mrs. Said,” said Mr. Said. “It makes me sad, Mr. Said, that we must do this,” Mrs Said said. “I understood what you said,”Mr. Said said. “But just saying it doesn’t make it so.” “But what of our poor daughter, Miss Said? When she said her name in class her teacher misheard her, and now her name is miss said whenever she is called on,” Mrs. Said said. “Well said, mom,” Miss Said said.

I enjoyed reading this article. Thank you. 😀

“If you are writing short dialogue, where each line is only a few words, you can use fewer dialogue tags. For example:

“I’m trying to study,” Jen said. “For what?” Ben asked. “A test,” Jen answered, “Do you need something?” “I guess not.” said Ben.”

First point I would like to make is that the length of dialogue has NOTHING to do with how many tags to use. Generally, it’s the less speakers, the less tags necessary. Remember, dialogue tags have just one purpose: to inform the reader who is speaking. If you only have two speakers, you can use near zero tags.

Second point is that the punctuation is wrong in the example.

“A test,” Jen answered, “Do you need something?”

“A test,” Jen answered. “Do you need something?”

“I guess not.” said Ben.

Should be “I guess not,” said Ben. Comma ends dialogue tag, not a period. Good luck and best wishes.

My personal opinion: Remove as many dialogue tags as possible Mostly use “said” Use alternative verbs for real emphasis rather than the norm And does the reader really care unless it is so excessive or unusual to break their concentration?

“Why are you running away from them?” asked Jerry.”Its complicated,”Sarah whispered with a sigh,”they want to use me as an evedence.” “why?what did you see?” “I can’t tell you any more.please leave me alone.” “You know I won’t do that.Not until you tell me the truth.”He hold her hand. she tried to pull her hand out of his.”Trust me.Im going to get everything figured out.” “Why don’t you let me help you?”he asked angrily. she stood up and as she was walking out of room said,”It’s safer for you not to know.I don’t want to put you in danger.”

The keynote speaker at a recent conference had just published a book, her first. The first thing her publisher had her do was change all the dialogue tags to “said” and to “put the person’s name first.” example … “This is what I want,” advised Bill. to “This is what I want,” said Bill. It looks like the correct answer is whatever your publisher says, unless you self-publish. Personally, I like a decent mix.

OOPS. my mistake…the correct way her publisher wanted was … Bill said.

“I,m glad you are coming in time for a quick supper,” said Mercy into her phone being held to her ear.

“Oh, sure,” answered Gretchen. “I’ve been looking forward to working on this Newsletter of yours.”

“Well, its not mine. I hope. It belongs to us. ”

“Sure enough. Ours. But truth told the idea was yours, Mercy.”

Mercy moved the phone from its shoulder hold to hold it in right hand sighed with exaggeration as she said, ” What, Gretchen, are you loosing your nerve and don’t want to be assocoiated in case this fails.”

“Oh Mercy, replied Gretchen, ” Why do you always have to look at things from the darkest view possible. I am just trying to give credit where credit is due. Can’t you get that through your thick skull. Sometimes the hardest part of working with you is getting you to accept your own contributions.” Sighing herself, Gretchen added, “You waste my precious energy trying to hold up the obvious when I might be making my own contribution.”

“OK, OK!!”, retorted Mercy. “Let’s just say good by for now, and I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“You got it, see you soon.” and Mercy heard the gentle click indicating this conversation was a done deal.

my 15 minute practice for today.

Dialogue is my favorite part of writing. Lately I’ve been trying to use as few tags as possible. I think it makes a scene flow better, but that’s my personal preference. This is something from a new-ish WIP (it’s a long story). Reviews are much appreciated!

“What?” Emmet was peering through the blinds on the front window.

“They sent Her Highness to work the case.”

“What are you talking about?” I left my charges to see what all the fuss was about. Emmet obligingly stepped aside to let me have a look. Outside the Kelley’s house a gleaming silver car was maneuvering into a parking space on the curb. “Who is that?”

“That’s Detective Cameron from the Major Crimes Task Force.”

“What kind of police detective can afford a Lexus?”

Emmet pursed his lips. “Detective Cameron is…interesting. You’ll see.”

“I guess I will. Can you take some more shots of the wounds to their heads for me? I don’t want to miss anything after we move the bodies.”

“Sure thing.” We left the window and Emmet hunkered down next to the corpses to take his shots. I watched over his shoulder, pointing out the details I was most interested in. He was good, definitely qualified for a bigger lab than Morton County.

There was a knock from the foyer. Sean hollered, “I’ll get it!” I heard the door open, and Sean chirped, “Hiya, Detective!”

If Emmet hadn’t already mentioned that the detective was a woman, I might not have been able to tell. The voice that responded to Sean’s greeting was smooth and deep. “Officer O’Dare. The bodies?”

“They’re right in here! Emmet and Dr. MacBride are already taking a look at ‘em.”

“MacBride? That’s a name I haven’t heard before.” The deep voice had entered the room. I turned around – and found myself staring into the darkest pair of eyes I had ever seen. I think Sean might’ve said something. I wasn’t paying attention. The dark eyes held my gaze and I had no interest in looking away.

I heard myself say, “That’s me. MacBride. Dr. Alexandra MacBride, hi.”

The woman to whom the eyes belonged shucked off her leather gloves and held out her hand. “Detective Alicia Cameron. Pleased to meet you.”

I like said. But that said, there’s another debate: “Ouch!” Bill said. OR “Ouch!” said Bill. Anyone stuck on this?

Name and then tag, I think. Puts the emphasis on who’s doing the speaking.

I think “said” is a great word and should be used every time it suffices. But I am not against using other verbs when they add intensity or help to make the scene clearer. Sometimes, I want to especify that my character is whispering, and not just saying something. I think that’s worth telling the reader. So I think that in the “said debate” I’m kind of in the middle.

“Why don’t you just take her to the park?” Rouge asked, propping her boot on the edge of the fountain.

Shadow massaged the bridge of his nose and sighed – again. “She shouldn’t be out in the open.”

“You sure that’s the real reason?”

He lifted his gaze, directing a scowl at his work partner. “I’m not taking her to the park.”

“You’d both have fun.” A smiled softened Rouge’s lips. “It’s not like you’re adopting her, Shadow.”

Rouge didn’t have a clue. He shifted his attention to the cloud-swept sky. There was no point in getting close to the girl he was watching over – not when she’d be taken from him.

Friendships were dangerous. They only bred pain.

His watch beeped. Turning toward the street, he said over his shoulder, “Got work to do. I’ll see you later.”

I lean closer to “said only” than “any dialogue tag goes”, but I don’t think it has to be limited just to “said”. In my opinion, tags like “asked” “whispered” “yelled” and “shouted” are ok, and can convey something about the words being said without becoming distracting, as long as they’re used sparingly.

Tags like “he entreated” “she queried” “he quipped” “she protested” can get in the way because words can’t be queried or quipped, etc, they can only be spoken. Also, when tags like “he quipped” are used, I know when I’ve read that in a book, it takes the fun out of figuring out on my own that what the character said was witty.

This topic is definitely debated pretty hard, and it’s always good to see everyone’s take on it. Thanks for the article, Kellie!

I just finished reading Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardogu and her ability to use very few dialogue tags and still make the dialogue easy to follow really stood out to me. I hope to apply that to my writing. As for the “said” debate, I think using more descriptive words when they flow to your mind as you write is better than always using “said,” but I don’t think that “said” should be banned in the name of forcing in a more descriptive word that doesn’t neccessarily even make the point of a specific sentace any better.

I am on the said team. I like to let the read use there own imagination and not tell them how someone said something. This was very helpful. Thank you.

I like the variety of the anti-said brigade. “Argued Ted” gives a clearer vision of the personalities involved. .

if you have to tell the reader how to hear your dialogue, you’re not writing it well enough

Hi Kellie, Just wanted to say a quick thank you for helping me out with dialogue tags! I didn’t even know that’s what they’re called! I’ve been writing songs since 1982, and decided recently to try my hand at prose. I’m having a blast, but it’s more difficult than I thought! Thanks again!

I have a question about using commas after a dialogue tag that follows the dialogue, when the sentence continues on. For example: “Punctuation can be so frustrating!” Karen said, and threw her hands up in the air.

Is it right to put the comma after the dialogue tag, even though the rest of that sentence doesn’t have a subject other than the “Karen” from the dialogue tag? I see this in fiction all the time, but can’t find any direct references to it online or in the Chicago Manual of Style.

I like the side of the argument that used more descriptive verbs as it helps define what the speaker’s character might be. Said and Asked are very impersonal

This is an old thread but I enjoyed it very much. A few years ago I came across a story in which the author used — to indicate the beginning of dialogue. I initially thought it was a pretty good idea but ran into problems when I wanted a dialogue tag in the middle of a conversation. Just curious if anyone has used that technique and how they handled it.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

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• Dialogue Words: 100 Alternatives | Now Novel - […] Over at The Write Practice, Kellie McGann takes a look at dialogue tags and how to use them effectively…
• The 5 Traps of Dialogue Tags – The Wise Ink Blog - […] what? Aren’t we supposed to use the same two tags for everything? How can you avoid being repetitive when…
• The Best Writing Practice: Why You Need to Practice Differently | Creative Writing - […] to default to “said”? Search through your manuscript or write a new passage and limit the dialogue tags you…
• Dialogue words: Other words for ‘said’ – Art of Conversation - […] Over at The Write Practice, Kellie McGann takes a look at dialogue tags and how to use them effectively…
• Kill Perfectionism With This One Practice - The Write Practice - […] nose-deep in all the complications of story writing, tangled in plot, character development, and dialogue tags. Or a Google…
• How to Publish a Short Story: Get Feedback and Edit Your Final Draft - […] to the nitpicky edits. You’re going to look for things like misplaced commas, split infinitives, icky dialogue tags (i.e.…
• Sensible and Nonsensical Design Decisions | The Alchemist's Handbook - […] Instead, design a cool-looking but realistic space suit. To distinguish between individuals, maybe use a separate color for each…
• Who Said That? - On (Not) Using Dialogue Tags – Erin Lafond - […] of ‘said?'” Those posts can be helpful because the general premise is correct. Using a dialogue tag like “said”…
• He said, she said: Dialogue Tags – Reet Singh - […] reading: Dialogue Tags: What Are They and How To Use Them Dialogue words: Other words for ‘said’ How to…
• 350 Other Words For Said Synonyms For Writing Dialogue Tags - […] Using a one-word reporting verb is a much better alternative than to add an adverb to a dialogue tag.…
• How to Write Clear, Concise, and Compelling Dialogue that Captivates Readers - Story Grid - […] dialogue tag is a small phrase either before, after, or in between the actual dialogue itself to communicate […]

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Speech Tags – How to Get the Balance Right in your Writing

• July 11, 2018

Sherlock Holmes' lips are sealed – probably for good reason (Drawing by Sidney Paget, public domain, via Wikipedia)

Speech tags – those little phrases that punctuate dialogue, such as “he said” or “she asked” – make up a tiny part of a manuscript, but amongst authors they can generate strong feeling out of all proportion to their size. This post draws on the collective wisdom of ALLi author members about effective use of speech tags in your writing. 

When authors discuss how not to write speech tags, they often cite startling examples from vintage literature such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories:

Holmes shrugged his shoulders.

“He has played a not unimportant part in this drama,” said he. “The three men having ascended the stairs, which they did on tiptoe, the elder man first, the younger man second, and the unknown man in the rear–“

“My dear Holmes!” I ejaculated.

Such extravagant and dated vocabulary may distract the twenty-first century reader , and there is now a move to keep speech tags to an absolute minimum , ideally using only “said” or “asked”, unadorned by adverbs .

As the odd “murmured” or “muttered” kept creeping into my own writing,  I began to wonder whether the modern trend had gone too far. I therefore sought the views of the ALLi author hive via our members' forum, and here is a summary of the lively conversation that ensued.

When To Use Speech Tags

In short, as seldom as possible.

The content of the dialogue should make clear who is saying what, from the logic of the conversation and from the linguistic style of each character taking part.

This should be relatively easy if the conversation is a duologue, but if three or more are involved, you may need more speech tags to avoid confusion .

Consider alternative devices , such as:

• adding “ beats ” or little descriptions of actions immediately before or after a speech to clarify who is saying what. ( Holmes set down his pipe. “I perceive you are recently returned from Afghanistan.”)
• inserting names of the speakers into the speech. ( “Holmes, how the devil did you know that?”)

Which Speech Tags To Use

Sssh! Keep those speech tags to a minimum (Photo by Kristina Flour via Unsplash.com)

The modern trend is pared-down simplicity , and some writers adopt a rigid rule of only ever using “said” or “asked”, free of adverbs, arguing that the tone of voice should be obvious from the words themselves, supported by the actions surrounding the speech.

But even these should be used sparingly , and only when really necessary for sense. Although plain words such as these seem invisible to the reader, even these will become an irritant if used too often or too widely.

If you find yourself muttering, whimpering, whispering, shrieking, or  wanting to modify plain speech tags with an adjective, check whether it is possible to embed the right tone in the text in a different way .

The Acid Test for Speech Tags

Self-editing for speech tags.

It's best not to get distracted by choice of speech tag while you're writing your first draft – just let the story flow. But then at self-editing stage , do separate pass through your draft specifically looking at speech tags. Highlighting them all may help you focus on them. Look out for:

• repetition of the same speech tags within a conversation (“Do you really love me?” he asked . “How can you doubt it?” she asked .)
• superfluous speech tags where the speaker's identity is clear from the context (“Susan, is that you?” asked Mark. “Yes, Mark, it's me,” said Susan .)
• more lavish speech tags than the dialogue requires – (“You take that back, you dog!” he shouted angrily .)

If you're still not sure after self-editing your manuscript, try reading it aloud:

• Do you feel self-conscious when you read the speech tags?
• Are they slowing down the story?

If they're distracting and detracting, it's time to ditch them and move on.

Second Opinions on Speech Tags

If you use beta readers to test-drive your self-edited draft, ask them to comment on your use of speech tags. Paid, professional editors will almost certainly comment on any dubious use of speech tags whether you want them to or not. It's a stylistic point worth discussing with your editor to agree what's right for your manuscript.

Are Writing Rules Made to be Broken?

As with any matter of writing style, it's likely that writers will worry far more than readers do about their use of speech tags.

Ultimately, what matters most is not what authors think, but whether readers enjoy their stories.

So if you're happy with the way you're writing your dialogue, and readers have never complained, don't feel obliged to rethink your strategy to fit in with modern trends. Now you know the thinking behind the move towards simplicity, as an indie author, it's your prerogative to comply or defy – or even to “expostulate loudly” in favor of doing it your way.

This post is a summary of a lively discussion between ALLi author members on our member-only Facebook forum, one of 21 benefits you'll gain by joining our nonprofit group. For more information about the other 20 great reasons to join ALLi , please visit the ALLi website here: www.allianceindependentauthors.org .

OVER TO YOU Do you agree with the modern trend for simplicity or has it gone too far? What's your favourite speech tag? Like to share any horror stories? Feel free to leave a comment!

OTHER PROVOCATIVE POSTS ABOUT WRITING CRAFT From the ALLi Author Advice Center Archive

Get It Written: Understanding The Seven Stages of the Writing Process: Orna Ross & Jerome Griffin

Writing: Why the Prologue Deserves a Place in Modern Indie Fiction

Writing Craft: The Challenge of Writing An Opening Line of Staggering Genius

Tastes do certainly change with the times. Writing styles suited to the early 20th century don’t cut it with readers 100 years later. With dialogue tags, as with anything else, I think it’s all about balance. And you can never go wrong with the “read it aloud” advice. It can reveal so much excess and awkwardness that an on-paper edit might miss!

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Dialogue Tags: Definition, Tips, and Examples

Dialogue tags are the words that frame dialogue in a piece of writing. These tags help readers identify the speaker, and can convey the emotion, tone, and context of a conversation. For example: in ‘“Thank God,” Alexandra said,’ the dialogue tag is ‘Alexandra said.’ 

We’ve already discussed how dialogue punctuation works in English, but we’re using this post to look at how you can use dialogue tags effectively:

1. The simplest dialogue tags are often the best

Bestselling crime writer Elmore Leonard stated in his 10 Rules for Writing that a writer must “never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.” While never may be a little extreme, it’s true that, in most cases, said is a sufficient tag.

Even though there are tons of colorful verbs at your disposal, the truth is that you should use unusual dialogue tags very sparingly. While using an alternative, like she called or he muttered , might sometimes be illustrative, it can also be distracting and pull readers out of the conversation. Said blends easily into the dialogue, allowing the actual talking to — well, do the talking.

For example, the two following lines convey pretty much the same thing — though one has a much more conspicuous dialogue tag: 

“Have fun at the party!” Sheila said.

“Have fun at the party!” Sheila trilled.

Reedsy's own Shaelin explains more about why, when in doubt, simple tags are the way to go in the video below. The video also contains a whole host of other tips for improving your dialogue, so be sure to check it out.

Having said that, once in a while, you might want to shake things up. So read on for more dialogue tag fun!

Which dialogue tag are YOU?

Find out in just a minute.

2. You can make ‘said’ more interesting

If you’re bored of plain old said, one of the best ways to balance your use of alternative tags is to simply use said — but make it pop and put a little garnish on it. 

On occasion, why not spice things up by adding some extra description in the form of an adjective or adverb. 

Here are a few examples of said with a common descriptor::

• “I’m in,” she said with a smile.
• “Let’s go,” he said with a sigh.
• “What a great movie!” they said, laughing .
• “I’ll see you later,” he said as he walked away.
• “Same ol’ Billy,” she said, shaking her head.
• “Fine,” he said in an [adjective] way.

Of course, you have endless possibilities and options when it comes to accesorizing said :

• ...he said with a salacious wink; 
• ...she said as she crossed her arms; 
• ...he said in a forlorn voice; 
• ...she said with profound concentration. 

You could also try out some adverbs for size, like happily and quickly . However, many writers consider adverbs a mark of purple prose , so keep them to a reasonable minimum. You might use an adverb to modify said in a particularly dramatic situation ( "How could you keep this from me?" she said furiously ). But otherwise, verbs and adjectives tend to do the trick. 

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3. Shake things up with action beats

Another strategy to make more interesting tags work is to break them up with action beats, or descriptions of what characters are doing in the scene.

If you're not familiar with action beats, they’re just phrases that indicate what a character’s doing as they speak. They can be used in conjunction with a said dialogue tag, or be used alone. This is because readers can pick up that the action beat is attached to the dialogue due to its proximity, and therefore that the actor is probably the speaker. For example: 

Alice stepped out from the shadows. “Did you forget about me?” 

Alice stepped out from the shadows is an action beat that shows the character's movement as she speaks, to signal that she's the one talking.

An action beat may appear before or after a line of dialogue, or even in the middle — just make sure to punctuate it properly . Here are a few more examples of action beats:

Murphy approached the stand and took a deep breath. "The defendant pleads not guilty, Your Honor."

"I was just trying—" I said through clenched teeth, trying to control my frustration, "—to help you out, for once in your miserable life."

"When are we going to the beach?" Sophie looked up at her mother expectantly . 

Action beats are a useful alternative to bona fide dialogue tags, and a great way to mix up your scenes. That said, as with other dialogue indicators, you want to keep action beats to a minimum. In a typical scene, you might have one extra-descriptive tag and a couple of action beats. The rest should all be he said/she said and implied speech, to keep the pace moving along nicely . Check out a real-life example below of dialogue from George Eliot's Middlemarch .

4. Not every line requires a tag

Dialogue tags are a bit like chocolate truffles: they’re great but you shouldn’t have one every time you open your mouth. In much the same way, you don't need a tag with every line of dialogue, especially if you've already established who's speaking!

To see why you shouldn't use too many tags, descriptive or otherwise, take a look at the following dialogue sample:

“What are you doing here?” he demanded .

“What do you think I’m doing here?” she inquired .

“You know this isn’t going to work,” he sneered .

"I think you're underestimating me," she retorted .

The descriptive tags here are clearly overkill — you can easily deduce the tone of the conversation without them. But even using he said/she said four times in a row would be unnecessary in this case, as it's only two people speaking. A much-improved revision would be to keep just one tag, and identify the second speaker in a more indirect way:

She stepped across the threshold . “What do you think I’m doing here?”

“You know this isn’t going to work."

"I think you're underestimating me."

The reader doesn't need many tags to see that this conversation is between two people. It's only in lengthy conversations of more than two that you may need to use said multiple times. And even then, you should still keep your "alternative" tags to a minimum, as they distract from the dialogue itself.

5. Try out an interesting synonym for size

If on the odd occasion you do want to get more experimental with your dialogue tags, then we’ve got just the resource for you. Our list of 250+ other words for said contains pretty much every synonym you could ever need, handily categorized by mood and tone. 

Some of our favorites include:

Hypothesized

Whatever you’re trying to express with your dialogue, you’ll find an appropriate tag in there.

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Upgrade your dialogue with our list of 270 alternatives to “said.”

6. Don’t force a word that doesn’t fit.

You might be raring to use all the exciting new tags you pick up from our “words for said ” post (and who can blame you? Vociferated is a great word). But it’s important to not only be sparing with their use, but also to make sure that, when you do use one, it’s perfectly chosen. 

Nothing is more distracting to readers than when a word just seems off . This is why, when you do use a descriptive dialogue tag, it needs to fit the situation perfectly.

While this tip might sound obvious, editors can attest that odd verbs in dialogue tags are all too common. For example:

“I never want to see you again!” he exclaimed .

That might seem like a good place to use the word exclaim, since we know it means to say something loudly. However, the underlying connotations of exclaim are a bit different — an exclamation is usually a positive shout of surprise, not a negative one. Better tags for the dialogue above might be:

• “I never want to see you again!” he bellowed .
• “I never want to see you again!” he roared .
• “I never want to see you again!” he snarled .

All of these depict the tone more accurately than exclaimed . And again, you don't even really need such a descriptive tag, as the message here is pretty clear.

But if you do decide to use one, make sure you know what it actually means! This is where our list comes in handy — you know exactly which words are associated with which emotions and scenarios.

“We hope you’ve enjoyed this how-to on dialogue tags,” the mysterious writer concluded. “If you’re looking for examples of dialogue tags in action, you can check out 15 examples of great dialogue analyzed, to see how the pros do it!”

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Home / Book Writing / Dialogue Tags: Everything You Need to Know About Speaker Attribution

Dialogue Tags: Everything You Need to Know About Speaker Attribution

Dialogue is a massively important component of storytelling. It conveys information, tells the reader about the characters, and even provides some white space on the page to help with reader fatigue. 

And with dialogue comes dialogue tags. There are certain conventions and rules to follow when it comes to these tags. And if you want to present the best book possible to your readers, it's a good idea to know the ins and outs of dialogue tags. 

• What dialogue tags are. 
• Why dialogue tags are important.
• How to use dialogue tags effectively (and what to avoid).
• Punctuation rules for dialogue tags.

Table of contents

• What is a Dialogue Tag?
• Why Dialogue Tags Matter
• Keep it Simple
• Use Other Verbs Sparingly
• Beware of Adverbs in Your Dialogue Tags
• Use Action Tags
• Put Dialogue Tags Where You Need Them
• Commas, Question Marks, and Exclamation Points
• Tags Before Dialogue
• Quotes Within Quotes
• Dialogue Tags: Conclusion

Sometimes called a speech tag or speaker attribution, a dialogue tag is simply a way to tell the reader which character is speaking a line of dialogue . 

Here's an example:

“I don't see anything,” Reggie said. 

“It's right behind you!” yelled Trina. 

In this example, “ Reggie said” and “ yelled Trina” are both dialogue tags. They make clear who is speaking in Reggie's case, and who is yelling in Trina's.

Pretty simple, right? Well, there are many ways to mess up when writing dialogue tags. And there are some conventions you'll probably want to follow. Let's take a look at why they're important before we get into some basic rules of dialogue tags. 

If you've ever read a long scene without dialogue tags, then you probably know why they're important. It can be easy to lose track of who's talking without speech tags. You find yourself flipping back a page to find the last dialogue tag, and then re-reading the section to keep straight which character is saying what—especially when more than two characters are talking. 

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This is definitely something to avoid. After all, there are only so many times a reader can be pulled out of the story before they put the book down in frustration . Luckily, fixing this is simple. 

Tips for Using Dialogue Tags 

The following tips can help you avoid dialogue tag pitfalls that even some experienced writers have trouble with. 

The word “said” is your best friend during dialogue in your book. Some people worry that using “said” too often gets repetitive for the reader, but in most genres, this isn’t the case. Essentially, “said” is invisible to readers. They see it, but they don't really register it as a new word.

Think about the last time you read a dialogue scene. You probably didn't even notice the word “said.” And if you did, it's likely because you were thinking as a writer. 

The words “asked” and “replied” are also common, although they're not used as much as “said.”

While you should only use as many dialogue tags as necessary, it's very difficult to overuse “said,” in your book. It's only when writers try to get fancy with their dialogue tags that things tend to backfire.

While it's true that writing the word “said” repeatedly in your dialogue scene can get old, be mindful of using other verbs. Writing dialogue tags like, “he huffed,” “she snorted,” “he bellowed,” or “she pouted” could distract the reader from the dialogue between characters. 

Sometimes called descriptive tags, these can be used sparingly to great effect in the occasional dialogue scene. A descriptive tag is one that uses a descriptive word in place of the verbs commonly used. Here's an example:

“I don't see anything,” Reggie balked. 

“It's right behind you!” Trina keened.

That's not to say that doing this on occasion is a no-no. The best thing to do is stick close to genre conventions. If other authors in your genre often use descriptive tags, then they may be common and okay to use. Otherwise, it's good to stick to the verbs readers are used to:

• Mumbled      

Also, varying the location of your “said” dialogue tags can also do a lot to provide variety. You have three places to put dialogue tags: the beginning, middle, and end of the dialogue.  

Chances are you've heard advice from writers like Stephen King (and many others) about using adverbs in your fiction. The popular sentiment is that you should use them sparingly. And this goes for dialogue, as well. 

Adverbial tags are those that include adverbs in the tag . Here's an example:

“I don't see anything,” Reggie said angrily.

“It's right behind you!” yelled Trina frantically. 

Good dialogue should speak for itself without the use of adverbs . The reader should be able to tell from context or other descriptions that Reggie is angry, or that Trina is frantic. 

That's not to say you should never use them. Every once in a while, an adverbial tag might just be the perfect thing for the scene. Just don't fall into the habit of overusing them.

There are other ways to tell the reader who's speaking than using “he said,” or “she replied.” One of the best involves the use of action before, during, or after the dialogue. These are called action tags. Here are a couple of examples:

Reggie squinted into the darkness. “I don't see it.”

Trina pointed. “It's right behind you!”

Although you don't explicitly say that the character is speaking, it's implied through the use of action and proper dialogue formatting. While you probably wouldn't want to use action tags repeatedly in the same scene, using them every so often is a great way to tell your reader who's doing the talking without spelling it out for them. Just remember that action tags are full sentences, and they should be treated as such .

As mentioned earlier, the most common error with dialogue tags is not using enough of them. The last thing you want is for the reader to get confused about who's talking. And since “said” is all but invisible to readers, you don’t have to worry about overusing it. 

While you certainly don't need to put a dialogue tag on every single line, it's a good idea to use enough so that there's no way your readers will get lost . Here's an example:

“When did you last see him?” the detective asked, looking at Jessica. 

“We're not answering any questions without a lawyer,” Dolly said.

The detective ignored her, raising an eyebrow at the younger woman. “Ma'am?”

Jessica crossed her arms and looked up, thinking. “Wednesday, I guess. Maybe Tuesday.”

“Jessica!” 

“Oh, stop it, Mother. He's just trying to do his job.”

“And was that here?” the detective asked. “At the house?”

In this example, you can tell from context who's doing the talking. You don't need a dialogue tag on every line, but it's always good to err on the side of caution. For example, leaving out the last tag might still have been clear to some readers, but it's teetering on the edge of having too few.

Punctuating Dialogue Tags

Now let's look at the rules for punctuating dialogue tags. Unlike many of the conventions above, these rules should be followed at all times. It’s also a good idea to learn about how to format dialogue, which you can check out in our article on formatting dialogue . 

Note: These rules are for writing American English. Rules may differ for writing in other forms of English. 

When it comes to dialogue punctuation before an attribution tag, the comma, question mark, and exclamation point are all treated the same . That is, they should always be inside the closing quotation mark and the first letter of the dialogue tag should only be capitalized if it's a proper noun. 

In normal writing, the question mark and exclamation mark act is a period would, but this is not the case with dialogue. Let's take a look at a few examples. 

“When did you last see him?” the detective asked. 

Note that “the” isn't capitalized because this is a dialogue tag and is treated as one sentence. 

“I don't see anything,” he said. 

In these two examples, you see the same rule at play. Neither “he” nor “yelled” are capitalized. Now, it would be different if the proper noun came directly afterward, like this:

Of course, the one common punctuation mark you never want to use before a dialogue tag is a period. Like this:

“I don't see anything.” he said. 

We've covered tags after dialogue, but what about tags before dialogue? The rules are slightly different here. Really, you just need to remember to always use a comma and that the beginning of the dialogue is treated like a new sentence . Here are a couple of examples:

Reggie said, “I don't see anything.”

She yelled, “It's right behind you!”

Whether you place your tag before or after the dialogue line is mostly a question of style, but the use of commas and capitalization at the beginning of the spoken sentence are rules that shouldn't be broken. Whether it's a proper noun or not, the first letter inside the opening quotation mark should be capitalized . 

But what if you have a line of dialogue split by a dialogue tag? If so, then the second portion of the dialogue doesn't need to be capitalized—unless it's a proper noun. For example:

“Well,” Victor said, “it's about time you showed me where you hid all that money.” 

Of course, if the two lines are complete sentences, then it will be as if you're starting a whole new sentence. Like this:

“Well, okay,” Victor said. “But I think it's about time you showed me where you hid all that money.”

In American English writing, we always use double quotation marks “ ” for dialogue. And when we want to write about someone quoting someone else, we use single quotation marks ‘ ’. Like this:

“What did he say?” Mark asked. 

“Oh, you're not going to believe this,” Whitney whispered. “He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with the way I see, and I'll have you know I can get up and down the stairs just fine.' I mean, can you believe it? After breaking both hips!”

Mark shook his head. “What'll we do with him?”

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In creative writing, it's essential to know the conventions for dialogue tags. Using appropriate punctuation becomes second nature after a while, but each writer has to decide on their own style when it comes to other factors. While the phrases “said she” and “said he” are falling out of favor in modern writing, they’re still going strong in some genres.

Likewise, the use of adverbial tags or “irregular” verbs in dialogue tags is also common in some genres.

The best thing you can do is read a lot in your genre, paying close attention to what your favorite authors do with their dialogue. Taking inspiration from them, you can develop your own style without taking the readers out of the story with too many strange dialogue tags!

Dave Chesson

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The Truth About Dialogue Tags and How to Make Mistakes Writing Them

One of the fastest ways to tell a book was self-published, or a fanfiction was written quickly, is to look at the dialogue tags.

Now, of course, most self-published books use dialogue tags well. Many authors either do their research and know the proper syntax, or hire a professional editor, or both—but not all. And the ones who don’t? Well… The proof is in the pudding.

I hate to be a negative Nancy here, but not all dialogue tags were created equal. Some are fantastic, some are mediocre, and some are just plain bad. However, there is one dialogue tag that rises above the rest when it comes to brevity and clarity: said.

Yes. My favorite dialogue tag is “said.”

Before we dive into why I never have and never will jump on the “said is dead” bandwagon, first thing’s first:

What are dialogue tags?

The most complete definition of a dialogue tag (or speech tag) I can think of is, “a phrase that comes before or after something is said to indicate which character spoke and how they delivered the line.” I’ve included some examples here; the dialogue tags are underlined.

“Will you go to the store today?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It might be better to go tomorrow.”

Frowning, she said, “If we wait until tomorrow, we’ll run out of toilet paper.”

It’s important to note that not every phrase that comes before or after a line of speech is a dialogue tag. More on that later.

Why isn’t “said” dead?

I’m not saying said isn’t dead just to be controversial. There are two main factors to said’s usefulness: it’s brief, and its meaning is clear.

“Said” is brief

To give you an idea of why I like the word “said” so much (or its present tense equivalent, as the case may be), I’ve included an exercise I worked on in a creative writing class in high school. Now, of course, it is by no means a great example of fine literature—it was merely a flash fiction draft I kind of took and ran with—but hopefully you’ll pick up what I’m putting down when it comes to dialogue tags.

Did you notice the dialogue tags? I’m willing to bet they didn’t stick out to you all that much—partly because half of them weren’t even there (remember, you don’t always need a dialogue tag). The other reason the dialogue tags don’t stand out? Other than “call out,” every tag is simply “says.” I didn’t use anything fancy when writing this piece because I didn’t need to; I wrote enough to indicate who was speaking and get my point across, and I left it at that.

The lovely thing about the word “said” is that your eye skips over it while reading; it’s not a flashy word by any standard. Instead of bogging down your reader with language they may not typically come into contact with, you allow the reader’s eye to skate right over the dialogue tag. This way, they can pick up on who is speaking while allowing them to focus primarily on what is being said. Which brings me to my next point:

Other dialogue tags carry different meanings

When you stray from simple words like “said,” “asked,” and “shouted,” you run the risk of using a word that carries a connotation you or your reader aren’t/isn’t familiar with. Replacing “shouted” with “ejaculated” is my favorite example (I think I’m actually twelve). 

Here’s the thing though—if your brain went somewhere dirty upon reading that, I guarantee you your reader’s went there, too. Some other words that frequently make it onto the “said is dead” lists include, but are not limited to:

…And plenty more I don’t want to name, lest you start over-using them in your own prose. (If you’re dead-set on using a word that isn’t “said” in every dialogue tag, Google “said is dead.” Just please don’t ask me to read the results.)

A quick word on using words like “sighed” or “laughed” (or any variation thereof) in your dialogue tags:  

These are a pet peeve of mine. More often than not, you don’t speak while laughing or sighing, you speak in between breaths while doing these things. My personal preference is to avoid using these as a dialogue tag, and instead use them in the description that surrounds said dialogue. Use them at your own risk.

That said, don’t feel like you need to avoid using these words in your dialogue tags—just use them sparingly. It’s good to spice up your prose, as long as you don’t over-do it. You don’t want to make your piece tedious for your reader to get through.

What SHOULD a dialogue tag look like?

So now that we know what a dialogue tag is, and how to effectively bog down the reader with them, how do we put together a good dialogue tag?

First, know the correct syntax.

• If the dialogue tag comes after the dialogue itself, end the dialogue with a comma and don’t capitalize the tag. CORRECT : “I love to read,” she said. INCORRECT : “I love to read.” She said.
• If the dialogue ends with a question mark or exclamation point, you still don’t capitalize the tag. CORRECT : “I love to read!” she shouted. INCORRECT : “I love to read!” She shouted. (This would be correct if the shouting was a separate action from the exclamation of, “I love to read!” In that case, however, it is a separate sentence and no longer a dialogue tag.)
• If you’re going to use a dialogue tag before the dialogue, put the comma after the tag and end the dialogue with a period (or another appropriate punctuation mark). CORRECT : She said, “I love to read.” INCORRECT : She said “I love to read.” VERY INCORRECT : She said. “I love to read.”
• No matter what, the dialogue punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. CORRECT : “That’s the right thing to do,” she wrote. INCORRECT : “This sets my eyeballs on fire”, she admitted.

Second, know which words you want in the dialogue tag, and why.

• In general, dialogue tags contain a name or pronoun, because they tell us who is speaking. EXAMPLE : “These rules are hard to remember,” Jackie said.
• Use special words when things are said in special ways. Uncommon words should be used when the character says something in a way that the actual dialogue (the words themselves) would not convey. EXAMPLE : “You’re a horrible person,” he whispered.
• Otherwise, use “said” or an equivalent word. Remember, boring doesn’t always mean bad—it means your audience can get on with reading the story. Words like “shouted” and “asked” are slightly less inconspicuous when compared to “said,” but they get the job done when they accompany the corresponding punctuation. EXAMPLE : “Dinner’s ready!” she shouted.
• Consider not using a dialogue tag at all, especially if it’s the middle of a conversation between two people and we already know who is saying what. As I mentioned earlier, dialogue tags aren’t always necessary. EXAMPLE : “I thought you said you put the chicken in the oven,” Susan said. Dan shook his head. “You said to take it out to thaw.” “I said put it in the oven.” “Well, honey, the chicken is not in the oven. What now?” “Now, I am going to take a nice, hot shower, and you are going to preheat the damn oven .”

Dialogue tags may seem confusing at first, but as long as you keep these points in mind, using them in your own work will be a breeze. If you ever get confused, my best advice is to simply pick up the first book you come across—preferably one that definitely went through a professional editor—and study the dialogue as it is written there. And of course, if you’re looking for more grammar/syntax advice, be sure to check out my post on using colons and semicolons ; they’re not as scary as you think.

How do you feel about dialogue tags? Do you feel comfortable using “said,” or do you avoid it at all costs? Tell me why in the comments—I’d love to hear from you. And, as always, happy writing!

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How to use dialogue tags in fiction

• Clare Black
• 27 December 2021
• No Comments

What is a dialogue tag?

A dialogue tag (also known as a speech tag) is a short phrase that is used to show which character is speaking. Dialogue tags can be used at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of dialogue.

‘Hello, Tom, fancy seeing you here,’ said Mandeep.

He said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘How long have you been waiting?’ asked Catherine .

‘This place is a tip,’ said Mel. ‘You can tidy it up immediately.’

Which dialogue tags should I use?

As with most aspects of fiction writing, there are no rules!

Active verbs are often used to describe how someone is speaking. Words such as countered, remarked, ejaculated, challenged, affirmed, laughed and opined are all popular choices but none of these actually describe the act of speaking. They are likely to jump out at the reader and possibly make the text look contrived. Well-written dialogue and the use of action beats should mean that over-descriptive dialogue tags aren’t needed.

Verbs that convey the act of speaking are the most effective to use, not those that express other actions. The dialogue itself should be showing the reader why the character is speaking in a certain way, rather than an over-descriptive speech tag. Readers know that ‘I think you are wrong,’ said Jake is Jake’s opinion. His opinion doesn’t need to be spelled out by stating ‘I think you are wrong,’ opined Jake. Using said or asked may seem bland and boring but readers tend to be engrossed in the story and will just want to know who is speaking. Remember that the purpose of a dialogue tag is to tell the reader which character is talking.

Consider how simply substituting said still gets the meaning over to the reader:

‘Sure, I will do that for you,’ she clarified.

‘Sure, I will do that for you,’ she said .

The character has already said she will do the task. We don’t need further clarification in the dialogue tag.

‘He did this to you?’ I questioned.

‘He did this to you?’ I said .

We know it is a question as it is phrased as such and has a question mark.

‘Yes, I am going out to buy another bottle of Pinot Grigio,’ affirmed Pauline.

‘Yes, I am going out to buy another bottle of Pinot Grigio,’ said Pauline .

Pauline has told us she is off to buy wine again. She doesn’t need to affirm it.

If you really don’t want to stick with said , the likes of whispered, yelled, shouted, mumbled and murmu red are alternatives that involve speaking and can be used, although this is best done sporadically. The occasional asked and replied thrown in is fine, although it is normally obvious when someone is asking a question or giving a response.

A table is included at the end of this post with my thoughts on dialogue tags that are best to use, those to use with caution and those that are best avoided. But, it’s your book and your choice as to which dialogue tags you prefer!

Using action beats to replace over-descriptive dialogue tags

Adding in an action beat can show a character’s mood or attitude. This allows the reader to imagine how the character is reacting or feeling, rather than telling them. If an action beat gives the reader enough information to picture the scene, a dialogue tag is not always required.

‘I want the room tidied instantly!’ I ordered.

‘I want this room tidied instantly!’ I slammed the door .

The abrupt statement is obviously an order, and the slamming door tells us the mood of the speaker, so the dialogue tag is redundant.

‘I have friends!’ I defended.

I folded my arms and scowled. ‘I have friends!’ I said, scowling .

I folded my arms. ‘I have friends!’ I said with a scowl.

The actions and the abrupt statement get the message across that the speech is defensive. We don’t need to be told by way of an over-descriptive dialogue tag.

‘You leave tomorrow evening. It’s final,’ they remarked.

They stood up . ‘You leave tomorrow evening. It’s final.’

It’s now more than a remark. The act of standing up helps us imagine the finality of whatever is happening. No dialogue tag is necessary.

‘Tomorrow, on the train, don’t talk to anyone. Is that clear?’ he demanded.

Sam thrust a finger in my face . ‘Tomorrow, on the train, don’t talk to anyone. Is that clear?’

Sam has made his demands clear in the dialogue, so no dialogue tag is needed.

‘My feet hurt. I can’t walk any further,’ I cried.

I slumped on the ground, removing my trainers. I grimaced and rubbed my swollen feet . ‘I can’t. I just can’t walk any further.’

The description of the action helps envisage the mood of the speaker and how painful their feet must be. The dialogue tag is redundant.

Using over-descriptive dialogue tags as action beats

If a verb doesn’t work as a dialogue tag, it might work as a standalone action beat. Take a look at the table at the end. Many of those verbs would make excellent action beats: h e smiled, she frowned, he sneered and she laughed all work well independently.

‘You just got caught,’ Harry laughed.

Rather than trying to convey how Harry can talk and laugh at the same time, using an action beat before or after the dialogue improves the rhythm and flow.

‘You just got caught.’ Harry laughed.

Harry laughed . ‘You just got caught.’

‘I don’t want to do that,’ I glared.

‘I don’t want to do that.’ I glared.

I glared. ‘I don’t want to do that.’

Adding an action after a dialogue tag

A comma is needed after the dialogue tag but before the adverb.

A comma is not needed when with is used after the dialogue tag, as in the second example. This would separate with a scowl from the verb ( said ).

I stamped my foot. ‘I want to go on holiday!’ I said, scowling.

I stamped my foot. ‘I want to go on holiday!’ I said with a scowl.

Using too many dialogue tags

Dialogue tags don’t need to be repeated every time a character speaks. The following example shows how tedious and repetitive this is:

‘No, I won’t do it,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Because I don’t want to,’ she said.

‘How selfish,’ he said.

‘You always say you’re going to pay me afterwards, but I’ve yet to see any cash’ she said.

‘I never said I wasn’t going to pay you,’ he said.

There are two people in the conversation, so the reader can work out who is speaking without having dialogue tags to tell them.

‘Why?’ said Ken.

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘How selfish.’

You always say you’re going to pay me afterwards, but I’ve yet to see any cash.’

‘I never said I wasn’t going to pay you.’

Adding in action beats will make the dialogue flow more smoothly.

She put on her coat. ‘No, I won’t do it.’

‘Why?’ asked Ken.

She picked up her bag. You always say you’re going to pay me afterwards, but I’ve yet to see any cash.’

Ken narrowed his eyes. ‘I never said I wasn’t going to pay you.’

Using adverbs with dialogue

Adverbs are often used with dialogue tags to give more information about the way that a character has said something. However, the adverb may not be necessary if the dialogue has been written in a way that conveys the same meaning. There is nothing wrong with leaving adverbs to support dialogue, but removing them may just tighten up your writing. Consider the examples below:

‘Let’s go, quick, quick! I’m desperate to get out and go for a run!’ Gerry said energetically.

‘Let’s go, quick, quick! I’m desperate to get out and go for a run!’ Gerry said.

‘Let’s go, quick, quick! I’m desperate to get out and go for a run!’ Gerry said, jogging on the spot.

We know from the exclamation marks and language that Gerry is keen and energetic and wants to go out for a run, so the adverb energetically is really not necessary. In the third example, adding in an action beat shows Gerry’s enthusiasm.

‘Oh, I know your dirty little secret, you devious bitch,’ said Juan knowingly.

Oh, I know your dirty little secret, you devious bitch,’ said Juan.

Oh, I know your dirty little secret, you devious bitch,’ said Juan, narrowing his eyes.

Juan already told us he knows the secret, so the adverb knowingly is redundant. The action beat in the third example shows Juan is not happy about the knowledge.

‘Go. Just go. I never want to see your cheating face again, you absolute lowlife,’ Edward said angrily.

Edward clenched his fists. His face reddened. ‘Go. Just go. I never want to see your cheating face again, you absolute lowlife.’ He threw the suitcase after Simon, scattering clothes and toiletries onto the pavement. The door slammed.

Edward’s actions show us that he is angry. The adverb angrily is redundant.

Double-telling

An easy trap to fall into is adding an adverb to a dialogue tag that gives the same information, for example murmuring quietly: murmuring is quiet by default. The adverb can be removed so that the dialogue tag does all the work. Alternatively, the dialogue tag can be replaced with said and used alongside the adverb.

‘Are you OK?’ she murmured quietly.

‘Are you OK?’ she murmured.

‘Are you OK?’ she said quietly.

‘I hate you,’ he shouted loudly.

‘I hate you,’ he shouted.

‘I hate you,’ he said loudly.

Suggested dialogue tags

Final words…     .

• The purpose of a dialogue tag is to tell the reader which character is talking.
• Stick with known and trusted dialogue tags that convey the act of speaking.
• Use action beats to improve the rhythm and pace of dialogue. Experiment with using fewer dialogue tags and include action beats as a way of showing who is talking.
• Consider removing adverbs that are not necessary if the dialogue already gives the same information. Also beware of using adverbs with a dialogue tag that givesthe same information.
• Read more on using dialogue in fiction.

Work with me

I’m  Clare Black , a fiction book editor based in Stockport, UK. I help independent authors prepare for publishing by fixing the important details and improving the readability of their books. I specialise in crime, thriller and contemporary fiction, but I am happy to consider other genres. I am a Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP).

I offer various packages to help indie authors get published and would love the opportunity to discuss your book and how I can help you prepare for publishing.

Email:  [email protected]

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Dialogue Tags: What are they and how to use them to your advantage

Last updated on December 31, 2019

What’s a Dialogue Tag?

Dialogue tags are narrator interjections, sometimes referred to as attribution, that note who speak the pieces of dialogue in your story.

A very real truth is that many a great story’s been decimated by the insertion of story-stalling wordy, repetitive, absurd, unnecessary and distracting dialogue tags. Writing is all about storytelling and context and it’s good to remember the writing style of any age is a fluid and evolving thing. What does that mean for dialogue tags? Leaving past styles in the past where the traditional presentation of dialogue was heavy with tags and adverbs, nowadays, s ometimes, we don’t need dialogue tags. And yet sometimes we do. Sometimes, we use “said” and then again sometimes we use adverbs.

However you use dialogue tags, the cardinal rule is they must be appropriate to the context, style and genre, enhance and never distract. Let’s deconstruct them a bit to learn how to use them effectively.

How to use Dialogue Tags

Composition.

Every dialogue tag has two components – the noun and the verb (+adverbs). This allows us to attribute an action to a character.

For example:  “said Mary (angrily)”

Mary = the character, this is the noun

said = the action Mary does, this is the verb

angrily = describes how “said”  (the action) is performed, this is the adverb

Okay, so some basic nuts-and-bolts of dialogue tags in use. There’s more than one way to insert them:

• before the dialogue
• after the dialogue
• in the middle of the dialogue

If you thought you could  only  insert them before or after dialogue, you’ll find this illuminating. Placement of dialogue tags is another device in your storytelling. Use it to affect pacing by breaking up or slowing down the action at the same time you note who speaks. Some examples in use:

Tag Before the Dialogue

Remmy spoke after a beat , “I have no idea where we’re going.”

Tag After the Dialogue

“A secret passage?” Miriam asked, sceptical .

Tag in the Middle of the Dialogue

“You were expecting a palace?” Jeff scoffed. “The rats won’t bite. Ignore them. C’mon, we need to hurry.”

Avoiding the absurd

Descriptive words in dialogue tags cue the reader to who’s speaking even if you don’t cite the name. Each character’s underlying motivation and the drama around them affects how their words are delivered. You can use this to your advantage. Using words other than “said” like “grumbled” or “whispered” can help convey the emotional state of your characters to make who is speaking clear. This is a good, specific use for dialogue tags that helps your readers stay on track.

Caveat: The danger here is going overboard. When it becomes unwieldy, you can end up making a parody of your own story. At its least offensive, overly descriptive dialogue tags “tell”, attempting to prop-up the weak prose around them that doesn’t “show” the action. Don’t be lazy and expect what you put in the tags to do this work for you. For example:

“Telling” tags instead of descriptive prose

When the door finally opened, Macy and Liam dragged several heavy duffel bags after them. “Get them in the car. Now,” Randy growled threateningly . “We don’t have time for this,” he huffed with annoyance .

Why is this guy so annoyed? We have no context here and no amount of adverbs telling us how he’s annoyed is going to tell us that. For comparison…

“Showing” prose with zero actual dialogue tags

Randy prowled around the parked car, impatient. There was no telling how soon the faceless man with the gun would catch them up. They had to get moving. Or they’d be dead. He jumped as the steel door finally banged open on Macy and Liam. Rather than rush out to make a quick getaway, they struggled with several duffel bags heavy enough to leave drag marks in the soft earth. Randy clenched his fists to keep from strangling them and jerked the passenger side back door open. “Get them in the car. Now .” He reached out and grabbed up one of the bags to speed them along, “We don’t have time for this.”

Nothing award-winning there, but you get the idea. The context is obvious, the story moved forward and no overbearing tags.

This is where the advice “don’t use anything beyond ‘said’/’asked’ in a tag” comes in.

Even with my journalistic background (where there’s nothing beyond ‘said’/’asked’), I think we can open that up a bit when it’s effective for a story. But I’ll die on the hill of it’s not the job of dialogue tags to convey the tension in your story . Do it with stellar prose. If your writing is strong, then you can use simpler, efficient dialogue tags like “said” or “asked” and often get away without them at all (like in the second example above). Some people argue this is a stylistic choice. They are what we like to call, wrong. ahem

Unless you’re doing it for effect, avoid packing adverbs around your dialogue or risk your work becoming labelled purple prose. What’s purple prose? ( Oy… that’ll take a whole other article… ) In a nutshell, purple prose (not to be confused with complex writing) is overly ornate, flowery, wordy and uses a lot of metaphors or figurative language. It draws attention to itself for no purpose.

When it comes to dialogue tags, less is more, so instead, put the effort into your prose. Always .

How often should you use dialogue tags?

Again, less is more.

If your storytelling is solid and conveys your characters’ emotion, motivation and actions through superior word choices and phrasing, don’t add unneeded distractions. Unnecessary or clumsy dialogue tags drop the magic curtain and reveal the author. Too many tags are distracting and pull the reader out of your story. Dialogue tags should remain invisible or at the very least unobtrusive.

Too many dialogue tags creating distraction

     “I don’t like it,” Francis huffed .      “Oh, it’s always all about you, isn’t it,” Charlotte retorted haughtily .      Francis lowered his voice accusingly , “Seriously? You have the nerve to still go there. After what you did?”      Charlotte’s forehead puckered angrily as she spoke . “Look, you can’t keep bringing that up. I said I was sorry! It’s in the past now. What more do you want from me?” she  inquired, cross .      Francis’s voice grew ragged in sudden anger , “What do I want?” he asked incredulously .      Charlotte dropped her voice and whispered in reply , “Just t ell me what you want and I’ll do it.”      Francis cleared his throat nervously , “I’m done.” He paused and then delivered his next words carefully , “It’s too late, “ h e snapped.      “What are you saying?” Charlotte whined .      “ I don’t know what I was thinking ,” he replied distantly . “This was a bad idea. There’s nothing left to salvage here.”

Yikes, over-blowing that for illustration hurt me. 😱  Anyway, clearly, all that “telling” used quite a lot of description and words, but the entire block of text doesn’t say anything important. It doesn’t move the story forward and t he dialogue tags overtake the conversation. This is unproductive. You can do it better.

Lean rewrite without tag distraction

     “I don’t like it,” Francis’s tone made it clear there was more to say, but he kept it to himself .      “Oh, it’s always all about you, isn’t it,” Charlotte snapped before she could stop herself .     “Seriously? You have the nerve to still go there. After what you did?”     Charlotte took a breath , “Look, you can’t keep bringing that up. I said I was sorry! It’s in the past now. What more do you want from me?”     “What do I want?”     “Just t ell me what you want and I’ll do it.”     “I’m done.” He paused . “It’s too late. “      “What are you saying?”      “ I don’t know what I was thinking ,” Francis shook his head . “This was a bad idea. There’s nothing left to salvage here.”

This is another way to go if you’ve exposed the inciting incident prior to this conversation. Doing it this way, even with limited dialogue tags, it’s wholly in context and the reader will be able to follow it without difficulty.

Bulked-out rewrite without tag distraction and including story disclosure

    Cranky, Francis inspected the renovation of their old living room. “I don’t like it.” “Oh, it’s always all about you, isn’t it,” back tensing, the words jumped out of Charlotte’s mouth before she could stop them. Separation and couples therapy helped nothing. Things had been so bad between them it didn’t take much to drop them right back into the old arguments. Cringing, she knew this wasn’t about renovating their former marital home. She just wanted to start over.      “Seriously?” His voice dripped ice, “You have the nerve to still go there? After what you did?”      It should have never happened. Randy had been his best friend. How was she supposed to come back from that? “Look, you can’t keep bringing that up. I said I was sorry! It’s in the past now.” What a mess. “What more do you want from me?”      “What do I want?” and clenched his teeth before he said something he’d have to report to the lawyer.      She hung her head, “Just t ell me what you want and I’ll do it.” All she knew was she wanted to fix this. Because she still loved him.      It was a long moment before he spoke again.”I’m done.” Francis shouldered her out of the way and made for the hallway. “It’s too late.”      “What are you saying?”      “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He paused in the entry to the hall and spoke over his shoulder, no longer capable of looking at her. “This was a bad idea. There’s nothing left to salvage here.”

When the conversation reveals your inciting incident, the words of dialogue become the means. Since the story is built-out during the conversation, there’s enough context to get away with little-to-no dialogue tags without confusing the reader.

Use as many dialogue tags as it takes to keep things clear

Keeping it to a minimum is great when you only have one or two characters speaking, but that isn’t always how it goes.

Speaking from personal experience, a conversation with multiple characters is difficult enough for the author writing it   to keep straight , so you can imagine how confusing it can be to the reader. This is a perfect situation for well-placed dialogue tags to keep your reader on track. During conversation between several characters, the goal is keeping the reader from having to step out of your story to wonder who said what. Having written myself into this particular corner with ensemble casts multiple times, while I doubt I’ll ever be perfect at it, I get lots of practice with this one.

I follow the rule of using only as many dialogue tags as it takes to keep who’s speaking clear. At the same time, I work to minimise distraction. I’ll wind a bit of the unfolding story around the ensemble conversation as well as disclose it through the dialogue. This adds the context that allows me to use less tags. This also lets me do things like not tagging some of the minor characters making interjections if there are any. Only the sentiment or emotion they convey is important to the story, not who made them.

While we always want to aim for natural-sounding dialogue, we can’t write exactly the way we speak, because the way we speak is boring. Writing dialogue well means we aim for an approximation of human speech where we take out all the boring bits and leave in the parts that move the story forward. In doing this, we can get away with occasionally referencing another character’s name. In the real world, we rarely do this, but we can cheat it.

“ Hey, Marty , can you pass me that sonic screwdriver?”

During ensemble conversations, a combination of one or two well-placed spoken character references (without making it weird), a couple dialogue tags and nestling the dialogue into the unfolding story to provide context   can get us out of a jam when multiple characters speak.

Using the right amount of dialogue tags clues the reader in without becoming noticeable, breaking the story flow, or hindering a reader’s immersion in your fictional world.

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Dialogue Tags: A Crash Course

by lauralizbuckley | Feb 11, 2020 | Writing

I wrote a post recently on punctuating dialogue in which I referenced dialogue tags, and I wanted to take some time to explore these in a bit more depth. Let’s kick off with a basic dialogue tags definition. These tags are used to provide a reader with information about who is speaking and how they are speaking. They can be used for clarity, emphasis, humour, or all of the above! Because you can put your dialogue tags in the middle of speech, they can also be used to manipulate the pacing of a bit of speech, or to break up long periods of spoken text. Dialogue tags can be incredibly versatile. They can also, of course, be misused. Today we’re going to look at three key problems that can arise when using dialogue tags, and some possible fixes for each case. Buckle up, we’re starting with a controversial one:

Dialogue tags that aren’t dialogue

“This work is pathetic,” Sophie gestured. “I tried my best,” Lola grimaced. “Maybe so,” Tarin scowled, “but we’re still going to have to start this project from scratch.”

I have seen people argue in favour of these kinds of dialogue tags, but a lot of editors and readers take issue with them, because these are not actually ways of speaking. Unless Sophie was using sign language, gesturing doesn’t communicate words. Grimacing is a facial expression, not a mode of speech. You can’t scowl a sentence. There are some nice easy alternatives though!

If you’re attached to the action itself and you want the action and the speech to happen at the same time, you just need to put a proper speech tag in and have your action verb in the present continuous tense:

“This work is pathetic,” Sophie said, gesturing.

(Just be careful with this one, and consider whether it is in fact possible to say whatever your character is saying at the same time as the action you’re describing.)

Another easy fix, if you like the action but don’t need it to happen at the same time as the speech, is to put the action first and finish it with a full stop. This way you’re clearly indicating that the action happened before the speech and not suggesting that the action was the speech.

Lola grimaced. “I tried my best.”

You can have the action come afterwards as well (“I tried my best.” Lola grimaced.) as long as you make the end of the speech the end of the sentence to be clear that what comes next is a separate action, not a dialogue tag.

Alternatively, if you were using the action to communicate a certain mood or a way of speaking but don’t necessarily want to include it specifically, you can just replace your non-dialogue-dialogue-tag with an actual dialogue tag, to convey the same information you were trying to get across before.

“Maybe so,” Tarin retorted, “but we’re still going to have to start this project from scratch.”

Overblown or redundant dialogue tags

“This is the most fun I’ve ever had!” Rose exclaimed. Eva pleaded, “Slow down, please.” “There’s no point riding a motorbike slowly,” Rose insisted.

Couple of issues here! For one thing, we’ve got dialogue tags that are telling us the same thing as the dialogue itself, which is the kind of thing you want to avoid—it’s not very interesting, and it creates padding that detracts from the important elements of your story. If you finish a sentence with an exclamation mark, you don’t need to inform the reader that the character ‘exclaimed’ that sentence. A similar thing applies with Eva’s ‘pleading’, where the content of what she’s saying conveys her tone clearly enough without that dialogue tag being necessary.

Another problem is that you just do not need elaborately descriptive dialogue tags after everything any character says. It gets to be too much. You can make things easier on your reader by replacing some (or even most) of your fancy dialogue tags with ‘said’ or ‘asked’, these terms disappear into the background when you’re reading and keep the focus on what the characters are actually saying to each other.

“Hey babe,” Nina called, “did you decide what we’re doing for dinner tonight?” “Not yet.” Faith said, opening the fridge for a quick look. “Have we got anything we can cook?” Nina asked. Faith closed the fridge again with a sigh. “Doesn’t look like it.”

Another two-person exchange, but rather than using a specifically descriptive dialogue tag for each line I switched to mostly said/asked, and tried to raise the interest level slightly by using the dialogue tags in different places—remember, they can go at the beginning, end, or in the middle of your characters’ speech—or using action beats to clarify who was speaking. Probably not the most inspiring character interaction you’ve ever come across, but hopefully that looks a little more natural than some of the examples we’ve seen so far!

Overuse of dialogue tags

“What’s the plan tomorrow?” Rogan asked. “It’s always my job to come up with a plan,” Leah muttered. “What was that?” Rogan asked. “Oh, nothing,” Leah said brightly. “I was sure you said something,” Rogan said, narrowing his eyes. “Nothing at all,” Leah insisted. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

If you just have two people talking to each other, you can probably trust that the reader will be able to keep track for a line or two. You don’t need to constantly remind them whose turn it is to speak. If we take out a couple of the dialogue tags from that exchange, it improves the pacing of the exchange significantly.

“What’s the plan tomorrow?” Rogan asked. “It’s always my job to come up with a plan,” Leah muttered. “What was that?” “Oh, nothing!” “I was sure you said something,” Rogan said, narrowing his eyes. “Nothing at all. What do you want to do tomorrow?”

Stripping away some of the tags makes the interaction feel more like conversation, without constant interruptions for the reader. You might choose to leave or remove different tags, depending on what aspects of the scene you want to emphasise, but if you find yourself tempted to tag everything I’d recommend you resist that urge. It isn’t necessary for clarity a lot of the time, and it can get in the way of your story.

Those were some quick fixes for dialogue tag issues I see most frequently . W hat are your pet peeves when it comes to reading dialogue?

I’m also aware that I’m barely scratching the surface here when it comes to things to consider about dialogue tags. Speaking—it’s complicated! Especially writing about speaking.

If there’s anything I’ve said that you disagree with, let me know in the comments. If you found this post helpful, I’d love to know that too! And if you’re looking for help improving your own dialogue, I offer some editing services you might find useful. Just saying…!

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Most Common Writing Mistakes: Misused Speaker Tags and Action Beats

How Not to Use Speaker Tags

The speaker tag , which in its most basic form consists of the speaker’s name and a speech-related verb ( said , shouted , asked , etc.), is often the simplest way of indicating which character is speaking.

Example: “I told you not to throw that cat at me,” Mike said.

4 Guidelines for Using Speaker Tags

• Don’t overuse speaker tags. It’s unnecessary to say “he said/she said” at the end of every line of dialogue. If you have only two speakers, you only need to indicate the speaker every few lines. If you have more than two speakers, vary your speaker tags with action beats (see below).
• Don’t vary the verb too often. “Said” is your most utilitarian speech verb. Its near invisibility allows your dialogue to stand alone without telling the reader how to read the dialogue. Use other verbs ( shouted , sniffled , whined ) and modifiers ( briskly , quietly , nervously ) with caution.
• Don’t underuse speaker tags. Whenever it’s possible readers might not understand which speaker is talking (such as after a lengthy paragraph of narrative), indicate the speaker at the first opportunity.
• Don’t punctuate the preceding dialogue with a period. Unless the dialogue ends with an exclamation point or a question mark, finish it off with a comma inside the quote marks, followed by the speaker tag (see example above).

How Not to Use Action Beats

The action beat is a description of the actions (gestures, facial expressions, or even thoughts) that accompany the speaker’s words. It is included in the same paragraph as the dialogue as an indication that the person performing the action is also the person speaking.

Example: “I didn’t throw the cat at you”—Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers—“but I am going to throw this!”

4 Guidelines for Using Action Beats

• Don’t combine action beats with speaker tags. Used together, they’re almost always repetitious. When in doubt, cut the speaker tag in favor of the action beat, since the action beat offers more opportunities for characterization.
• Don’t use action beats solely for the sake of speaker identification. If the only reason you’ve inserted an action beat is to identify the speaker, you’re probably better off with a speaker tag. Action beats must serve to move the story forward or advance characterization; they cannot exist only to give the character busy work.
• Don’t allow action beats to interrupt your dialogue. A lengthy action beat in every line of dialogue will chop up the rhythm of the characters’ speech and destroy the flow of the conversation.
• Don’t punctuate the preceding dialogue with a comma. Unless the action beat interrupts a dialogue sentence (see example above), always end the dialogue preceding the action beat as you would if it stood alone.

If you can expunge these common mistakes from your dialogue, you’ll not only strengthen your characters’ conversations, you’ll also mark yourself as a professional.

>>Click here to read more posts in the Most Common Writing Mistakes Series.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! How do you decide when to use speaker tags and action beats in your writing? Tell me in the comments!

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K.M. Weiland is the award-winning and internationally-published author of the acclaimed writing guides Outlining Your Novel , Structuring Your Novel , and Creating Character Arcs . A native of western Nebraska, she writes historical and fantasy novels and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors.

I think I use both correctly, although I probably occasionally combine both action beats and tags (mea culpa!) I guess I’ll be on the lookout for those in my next editing pass. Unfortunately, it’s something I picked up from a famous author, so I may have a hard time shaking it.

Other than that, I think I’m in good shape. 🙂

Oh, those bad habits we pick up from famous people! 😉

Good reminders — I’ll be doing a workshop on dialogue for Savvy Authors in June, and these are good points to remember. However, the use of commas in the example of action beats looks “off” to me — more like a run-on sentence. I tend to use dashes to set them off.

And YES to using ‘said’ rather than “clever” tag words. It does disappear from the page, whereas all those fancy tag words jump right out, slowing the reader who usually stops to make sure the dialogue matches the tag.

Terry Terry’s Place Romance with a Twist–of Mystery

One thing I like to do with action beats is – all other things being equal – if there’s any question at all about who the speaker is, I like to put the action tag first, then the quote.

Carla grabbed the knife from the counter. “Why are we even talking about this any more?”

rather than the other way around. That way, by the time the reader gets to the dialog, they know for sure who the speaker is, rather than reading the dialog, having a split second of wondering, then being like, “Oh, that was Carla, right.”

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I like to do what I can to avoid even momentary reader confusion (unless I’m deliberately going for that).

@Terry: Truth be told, if I were actually using that sentence in a manuscript, I probably *would* separate the independent clauses into individual sentences. But, as it is, it’s not a compound sentence, not a run-on.

@Cameron: I agree. Always identify the speaker as quickly as possible, whenever there’s any doubt about who’s speaking. When you have a short dialogue clause preceding the speaker tag or action beat, you’re usually okay, since readers will see the name near the beginning of the sentence even before they’ve actually read that far.

I tend to overuse action beats. You’d think my characters were all on crack with the way they fidget and twitch and wiggle, even in the middle of a conversation. 🙂

It’s one of my writing quirks that I always have to pare down in revision.

I tend to overuse them in the first draft myself. But when the big red pen comes out, they have to scram!

I could probably make more use of action beats but I think I’m pretty good with the way I use speaker attribution.

It amuses me that in primary school, I was taught not the use “said” because it was too common and boring. The teacher had a big poster on the wall titled “Instead of Said” and we were encouraged to use alternative tags at every opportunity.

It wasn’t until I started reading books about writing as an adult that I discovered this was wrong.

Using “said” instead of more imaginative alternatives is counter-intuitive. In all other areas of writing, we’re *supposed* to use big, bold verbs. The difference here is that the big, bold verbs become repetitious when paired with strong dialogue.

I just did a flash fiction piece this Friday which relied solely on dialogue. It was a little tricky, because I needed to switch back and forth between two separate dialogues. I think I did pretty well, but I could have used some more action beats to replace the redundancy of all those “saids.”

One of my favorite “gimmicks” is solo dialogue. I love the dependency on the spoken word and the complete lack of explanation. It allows the subtext to speak loudest of all.

Great advice KM! The run through the piece usually results in a few too many or too few tags and actions. Since I prefer the first person I like using internal monologue or analysis to tell who’s carrying the conversation.

That would be my preference as well. Whenever possible (and it should almost *always* be possible), let the narrating character tell the story. Everything should be filtered through his lens, even other characters’ dialogue.

Thanks for this comment. I”m a bit confused though. I understood that in 3rd person, the narrator is invisible. She can be allowed inside one or more characters’ heads (limited omniscience) or inside all characters’ heads (omniscient narrator) or inside no one’s head. But in any of these three cases it is still the narrator relating the events, isn’t it?

Maybe a “narrating character” one of the characters whose thoughts are open to the the narrator?

A narrator *can* be omniscient (essentially, the author), but deep 3rd-person is basically like 1st-person in that it is told strictly from one character’s perspective and in that character’s voice.

This was so helpful. Thank you!

Glad it was useful! Thanks for reading.

I tend to go tagless, specially when it is a two-character conversation. The deeper I go, the less tags I use, letting their words define them.

Or maybe I just lazy.

As long as there’s no risk of reader confusion, that’s the best way to do it. Dialogue is the most organic manner of *showing* available in written fiction. The more we can allow it to stand on its own, the better.

Good advice. I think I use tags and beats pretty well now, but I’m finding poor use in things I wrote a few years ago that I’m now revising and editing. Thanks!

Seeing mistakes in old stories is a sure sign of growth. It’s definitely something to get excited about!

So in another post I read a proposition of a whole list of “busy work” for characters to do to avoid them becoming “talking heads”. Here I read I should avoid doing action beats too much to specifically avoid the “busy work”. Am I missing something or there’s inconsistency between the posts?

If it’s “busy work” in the sense that it’s something *just* to fill the character’s hands and give him something to do while talking, you’ll want to avoid it. But, at the same time, it *is* important to vary dialogue with action and internal narrative. The trick is to make certain that whatever the character is busy with in the scene is something that brings added depth to the story. It needs to either advance plot, develop character, or provide subtext.

Sentences like “I didn’t throw the cat you,” Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers, “but I am going to throw this!” set my teeth on edge. Aside from the missing word “at”, the grammar can’t be correct. If I were writing this, I would write: “I didn’t throw the cat at you,” Leigh said, grabbing a vase of flowers, “but I am going to throw this!”

I’ve seen way too many examples of action beats that turn into speech tags, and they make no sense. In my mind, “I don’t know,” John walked across the room will always be wrong.

Anonymous, I’m with you. But I don’t think you’re contradicting anyone here about it. Action beats can be SO awkward and SO overused, that they themselves become interruptions in the dialogue. Less is best, and variety is the spice of life – to quote two time-worn clichés. I try to write tags and beats (a) only to keep track of the speaker, and (b) by the rhythm of the words.

My pre-editor, ie, my brother, said that my tag lines are driving him crazy. I think he’s talking about things like, “I have to go to the store,” Katra said, standing to put on her coat. Is that a bad idea? Should I try to eliminate those from my dialogues?

You’ll very rarely need both an speaker tag *and* an action beat. I would suggest whittling down your example to either, “Katra said,” or, “Katra stood to put on her coat.”

Thanks, that’s a big help.

@Anonymous: Sorry I missed your comment earlier. As I mentioned in my response to Donna’s comment above, there’s rarely a good reason to use both an action beat and a speaker tag (as in, “Leigh said, grabbing”). You’re absolutely correct that an action beat should not be used as if it were a speaker tag, by “hooking” it onto the preceding quote with only a comma. The only reason it’s acceptable in my example is that the action is interrupting the quote, as indicated by commas on both sides of the beat. Had the action come between two complete sentences of dialogue (e.g., “I didn’t throw the cat at you.” Leigh picked up the vase of flowers. “It was the dog!”), then commas at either end of the action beat would be incorrect.

And thanks, BTW, for point out the typo! I’ll fix that right away.

Glad the post was helpful! Some writers feel that “said” can be overused, but it’s so invisible, most readers don’t even notice its repetition.

Apologies if comments are are no longer welcome since this is an old post, but I just came across this and was bothered by the example you gave for inserting an interrupting action. As I understand it, when interrupting dialogue with an action, em dashes should be used and not commas. Simply using commas would turn the action into speaker tags, which is incorrect as you’ve also said.

You know, you’re right! I’ll fix that.

Tay, I’ve never heard that or read it in any of the style guides. Can you share where you found that instruction for using em-dashes instead of commas to interject beats of action? Of K.M. Do you know where to find the source of that style?

He’s right that it’s always incorrect to punctuate an action beat like a speaker tag: e.g., “Don’t do that,” she hit him.

So, of course, it only makes sense for the same to hold true when the action beat is in the middle of the dialogue.

But I couldn’t tell you what manual that’s from.

The use of “said” as the only dialogue tag was drummed into my little head by my first book coach, a former editor for MacMillian and St. Martin’s press with over 35 years of experience. In the publishing business, they hate anything other than that, especially when the tag is beefed up with an adjective. [“I hate you,” she said angrily.] But varying the “said” with action beats, and using none all is great advice. Thank you for sharing. I have all your articles on speed link.

“Said” is a workhorse in dialogue. It should definitely be our go-to tag. But it’s worth noting that alternatives don’t have to be avoided in toto . The occasional “murmured” or “hissed” are acceptable.

I do like a good murmur, K.M., but some tags are really hard to do while speaking – like “I don’t want to,” he choked. Or one of my favorite from me editing, “You should be more careful,” she pointed out. What’s up with that? I know we should avoid being Robert Ludlum. One of his is my favorite. “I repeat,” he repeated.

What I like about “said,” is that the tag disappears and lets the dynamic, highly-charged dialogue shine through. The only reason newbies (and I was a newbie once as well) use beefed up tags, is they don’t have confidence in their reader and must TELL the reader HOW the speaker meant something.

But you’re right, there must be balance in the Force. Thanks for writing for us.

Hah, yes, that Ludlum line is infamous. I think he also wrote an “‘I apologize,’ he apologized.”

You’re absolutely right about the power of “said” being its invisibility. But there are those occasional exceptions where the dialogue can’t stand on its own and does need the author to interpret for the reader. Still, as you say, it’s always an exception to the rule.

I’ve always ended a sentence like “Don’t do that,” she hit him as this [“Don’t do that.” She hit him.] then go one with the rest of the sentence like it’s a new one.

Something to consider. Hmmmmm!

The reason for this is that a character can “say” or “shout” or “whisper” a line of dialogue, but they can’t “hit” a line of dialogue.

Thank you, you’ve reminded me of how much I still need to learn

I may be guilty of using action beats to give characters busy work. I actually hate dialog tags in most instances, because I feel like action beats can say so much more. If I have any reputation in my critique group, it’s for my crusade against overuse of dialog tags.

My characters look at each other a lot though, via action beats. It’s annoying. If I do anything wrong, it’s that I emphasize facial expressions too much. I need to learn how to diversify the emotional subtext beyond just describing people’s faces. Just running through a typical dialog passage… narrowed eyes, flushed faces, shaking or nodding heads, mouths forming hard grim lines. I know it’s because that’s what I pay attention to IRL when I’m interacting with someone, but it creates problems in fiction. If I see the word ”eyes” in my MS one more time, I’m going to scream.

Your example is below: Example: “I didn’t throw the cat at you”–Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers–“but I am going to throw this!”

If the action beat were not inserted in the dialog, I would put a comma after you, e.g., “…at you, but I…” I believe the comma should still be included before the action beat insert. Therefore, I would punctuate thusly: “I didn’t throw the cat at you,”-Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers-“but I am going to throw this!” Am I in error? If I am, please, quote a source. Thank you Donna

Yes, this is incorrect. There’s no reason to double up the punctuation. Optimally, you will usually want to insert the action where a natural break occurs, so it will often go where a comma normally would. More here: Punctuation in Dialogue .

Should one always use dashes like in your example?

Example: “I didn’t throw the cat at you”–Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers–“but I am going to throw this!”

could a person do this:

Example: “I didn’t throw the cat at you.”Leigh grabbed a vase of flowers.“But I am going to throw this!”

Thank you, Paul Nieto

Yes. As long as you’re putting periods to clauses that could stand as sentences in their own right, that’s fine.

“Don’t combine action beats with speaker tags…” Oops, guilty as charged. (Raises hand sheepishly.) I know what editing I’m going to be doing this weekend. Thanks for the insight!

Thanks for another great post! My editor has eagle eyes and finds all those unneeded dialogue tags and overused beats for me, after I sift through and try to clean them up myself. But what I want to know is, did she throw the vase or not? 🙂

Makes for a better story if she does, right? 😉

Unconsciously, I started using action beats to give specific traits to some of my characters. Now that I have read this I have a better understanding of how to use action beats. When I first started writing conversation I worried too much about tags. Should I use replied, said, or what? I gave up using tags almost completely when only two characters were talking. Instead I identified them at the beginning of a conversation and in the middle if it was a long exchange and again at the end in an attempt to keep it clear who said what. I will return to my editing with this article in mind and correct any mistakes. Thanks.

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• The Writer's Beat > Writing Craft > The Reference Room > General Writing >

Speech Tags

Post Feb 01, 2009 #1 2009-02-01T18:40+00:00

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SPEECH TAGS They can do more than just tell the reader who is speaking

Oh wow, this seems fun. Here’s what I got. 🙂

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked with a bright smile, hoping that he’d answer. Our previous converstaion didn’t go too well, and deep down, I knew it was my fault. Annoying other people is one of my specialities, but hurting them isn’t one of them. I stood right infront of him, waiting eagerly for a reply.

“Nothing here,” He muttered after a few seconds of silence. His voice sounded neutral, but he dared to ask, “What about you?” My heart skipped, he’s not mad at me. A gush of relief rushed though me as I smiled again. He was crearly avoiding eye-contact, but talking with me again was more than enough for now. Maybe Emmott was right, maybe being friendly was a good thing.

“I’m good thanks.” I almost singsonged. For some unexplainable reason, I was really glad that he talked to me again. He nodded brushing his thick trousled hair from his face. He was still staring at the pile of rocks down below.

Love it! I like how you broke up his two lines with a pause before he responds with “what about you?” I think it’s so fun to play with snippets of dialogue like this because the actions/tone of voice/body language etc. adds so much to a conversation.

what is this story based on

The question marks muddy the example. I was looking for comma placement. “Words words(,?)” action (,?) more words. Or “Words words(,?)” action (,?) More words.

The second cap only happens if the second comma does not happen. But Should the first questionable comma happen? or should both? Or neither?

Hi Sean – I’m a little bit unclear to your question, but I’ll give it a go. I actually think you wouldn’t use commas in this situation at all. It would be periods, especially if the action tag in the middle is a complete sentence. If you use a dialogue tag AND an action tag, you’d use a comma.

Just action tag example: “I wish I hadn’t eaten that second piece of cake tonight.” Taylor slowly tipped over until she was laying down in the restaurant booth. “Why did you let me get it off the buffet?”

Action & dialogue tag example: “I wish I hadn’t eaten that second piece of cake tonight,” Taylor said as she slowly tipped over until she was laying down in the restaurant booth. “Why did you let me get it off the buffet?”

Does that answer your question?

“What’s up?” Henry’s voice reached me through the phone. “Nothing here. How about you?” My heart surged waiting on his reply. Paying attention to his voice, trying to hear any sign of a lie. Was he really keeping that from me? He hesitated for a moment and I could hear in his voice when he replied “I’m good, thanks.” The lie.

“What’s up?” The figure spoke in a low voice from the shadows making him jolt. “Nothing here” Gary quickly replied recovering from the jump. “How about you?” “I’m good, thanks” so polite, anyone who might hear her would never guess she was a trained assassin.

Ohh – the phone conversation is kinda fun. It’s harder to add action there, but your line about paying attention to his voice, listening for the lie is great. I think we’ve all been there, and you captured it with his momentary hesitation. Nice job!

Thank you for sharing such useful techniques so clearly, Amy.

You are so very welcome, Charles!

Are words like teased, laughed, probed or prodded action tags?

Hi Connie, Those are actually other ways to say “said.” They’re more descriptive than said but they aren’t really action tags. An action tag is a sentence where you show what the character is doing. For example, “Susie, I’m going to ask you one more time. Where were you last night?” My dad stared at me without blinking, his arms resting on his knees as he leaned forward and waited for my answer.

This action implies probing or prodding without but also gives the reader a physical description of what’s happening in the scene. Does that clarify for you?

A bit late to the party, but I thought I’d have a go.

I collided with her has I rounded the corner past the boy’s locker room. “Hey, what’s up?” I blurted out awkwardly. I’d been trying to avoid her since our argument the day before, but there was no escape now.

“Nothing, here,” she replied with a venomous tone. “What about you?” I could see the hurt in her eyes, the blueness of them seemed to be tinged with a grey that conveyed her mood. I was fighting the urge to hug her and say sorry, but there was something holding me back.

“I’m good. Thanks.” I managed to strangle out as a reply, totally covering up my true feelings of course. Before I could say another word, she turned away and strode purposefully down the hall. Watching her go, I knew I had to fix this, as regret etched its way into my heart.

Oh I love it. You do a great job of describing how the words are said ie. “venomous tone,” “managed to strangle out” without being over the top. I also like the collision at the beginning, so it starts off with a strong action.

I was surprised recently by a authortuber saying, dont use action tags to replace dialogue tags. She said the rule is “she said and got out of the chair”. She called it amateurish and fanficky!! But this is what i learnt from many writing craft books, and another author on youtube taught about actions to replace the dialogue. This author told me many published authors use action tags to replace dialogue tags, and i felt better after it. Have you found this contentious? Christopher kokoski was the author who made me feel loads better. I learnt this method by focusing on deep pov.

I’ve honestly never thought about action tags vs. using said as a potentially contentious issue – kind of funny to think of that way! I think this is a style issue which is personal to every writer. I just pulled A Fault in Our Stars by John Green, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig off my bookshelves. John Green writes dialogue like your authortuber suggests – he uses said, asked, or responded (etc.) followed by an action tag.

Diana Gabaldon does all of the above. She uses straight action tags. She uses said/asked etc. alone and followed by an action. She also uses quite a few adverbs to describe how characters speak such as “he said ironically, good naturedly, brusquely” which every writing book ever says not to do. Clearly, it has not impacted her readership! I’ve read the entire Outlander series (millions of words) and have noted her adverbs but never felt that they weakened her dialogue or writing.

Matt Haig has a different style where he uses both action and dialogue tags. But, he also tends to break his dialogue up with internal thought monologues from the main character. Here’s an example from p. 54: “She took off her shoes. ‘I’m not.’ A memory came to her, related to the Jaws t-shirt. A tune, actually. ‘Beautiful Sky.’ [insert extended memory] ‘Yeah,’ he’d said. ‘it’s okay.’ She wondered….[more memory which reads to me like an action tag]”

All of these work. I don’t think that you should stick to a hard and fast rule like ‘only use said followed by action,’ or ‘only use action tags.’ Use what works for the story and for your writing style. When I teach creative writing, often beginning writers are unaware of action tags or of how to use or write them, hence this post.

I encourage you to pull some of your favorite novels off the shelf and see how the authors handled dialogue. Study them. Read like a writer and see if you can figure out what you like and why you like it, then play with that in your own stories. I have both blog posts and a podcast episode on reading like a writer that might help.

I hope this helps! Amy

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Part-of-Speech Tagging

Article info.

• Multilingual POS Tagging
• Hidden Markov Model
• Dependency Parsing
• Named Entity Recognition
• Word Sense Disambiguation
• Text Corpus for NLP

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In the processing of natural languages, each word in a sentence is tagged with its part of speech. These tags then become useful for higher-level applications. Common parts of speech in English are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.

The main problem with POS tagging is ambiguity . In English, many common words have multiple meanings and therefore multiple POS . The job of a POS tagger is to resolve this ambiguity accurately based on the context of use. For example, the word "shot" can be a noun or a verb. When used as a verb, it could be in past tense or past participle.

POS taggers started with a linguistic approach but later migrated towards a statistical approach. State-of-the-art models achieve accuracy better than 97%. POS tagging research done with English text corpus has been adapted to many other languages.

A POS tagger takes in a phrase or sentence and assigns the most probable part-of-speech tag to each word. In practice, input is often pre-processed. One common pre-processing task is to tokenize the input so that the tagger sees a sequence of words and punctuations. Other tasks such as stop word removals, punctuation removals and lemmatization may be done before tagging.

The set of predefined tags is called the tagset . This is essential information that the tagger must be given. Example tags are NNS for a plural noun, VBD for a past tense verb, or JJ for an adjective. A tagset can also include punctuations.

Rather than design our own tagset, the common practice is to use well-known tagsets: 87-tag Brown tagset, 45-tag Penn Treebank tagset, 61-tag C5 tagset, or 146-tag C7 tagset. In the architecture diagram, we have shown the 45-tag Penn Treebank tagset. Sketch Engine is a place to download tagsets .

POS tagging is a basic task in NLP . It's an essential pre-processing task before doing syntactic parsing or semantic analysis. It benefits many NLP applications including information retrieval, information extraction, text-to-speech systems, corpus linguistics, named entity recognition, question answering, word sense disambiguation, and more.

If a POS tagger gives poor accuracy, this has an adverse effect on other tasks that follow. This is commonly called downstream error propagation . To improve accuracy, some researchers have proposed combining POS tagging with other processing. For example, joint POS tagging and dependency parsing is an approach to improve accuracy compared to independent modelling.

Sometimes a word on its own can give useful clues. For example, 'the' is a determiner. Prefix 'un-' suggests an adjective, such as 'unfathomable'. Suffix '-ly' suggests adverb, such as 'importantly'. Capitalization can suggest proper noun, such as, 'Meridian'. Word shapes are also useful, such as '35-year' that's an adjective.

A word can be tagged based on the neighbouring words and the possible tags that those words can have. Word probabilities also play a part in selecting the right tag to resolve ambiguity. For example, 'man' is rarely used as a verb and mostly used as a noun.

In a statistical approach, we can count tag frequencies of words in a tagged corpus and then assign the most probable tag. This is called unigram tagging . A much better approach is bigram tagging . This counts the tag frequency given a particular preceding tag. Thus, a tag is seen to have dependence on previous tag. We can generalize this to n-gram tagging . In fact, it's common to model a sequence of words and estimate the sequence of tags. This is done by the Hidden Markov Model ( HMM ) .

• Rule-Based : A dictionary is constructed with possible tags for each word. Rules guide the tagger to disambiguate. Rules are either hand-crafted, learned or both. An example rule might say, "If an ambiguous/unknown word X is preceded by a determiner and followed by a noun, tag it as an adjective."
• Statistical : A text corpus is used to derive useful probabilities. Given a sequence of words, the most probable sequence of tags is selected. These are also called stochastic or probabilistic taggers. Among the common models are n-gram model, Hidden Markov Model ( HMM ) and Maximum Entropy Model ( MEM ).
• Memory-Based : A set of cases is stored in memory, each case containing a word, its context and suitable tag. A new sentence is tagged based on best match from cases stored in memory. It's a combination of rule-based and stochastic method.
• Transformation-Based : Rules are automatically induced from data. Thus, it's a combination of rule-based and stochastic methods. Tagging is done using broad rules and then improved or transformed by applying narrower rules.
• Neural Net : RNN and Bidirectional LSTM are two examples of neural network architectures for POS tagging.

POS taggers can be either supervised or unsupervised. Supervised taggers rely on a tagged corpus to create a dictionary, rules or tag sequence probabilities. They perform best when trained and applied on the same genre of text. Unsupervised taggers induce word groupings. This saves the effort of pre-tagging a corpus but word clusters are often coarse.

A combination of both approaches is also common. For example, rules are automatically induced from an untagged corpus. The output from this is corrected by humans and resubmitted to the tagger. The tagger looks at the corrections and adjusts the rules. Many iterations of this process may be necessary.

In 2016, it was noted that a completely unsupervised approach is not yet mature. Instead, weakly supervised approaches are adopted by aligning text, using translation probabilities (for machine translation) or transferring knowledge from resource-rich languages. Even a small amount of tagged corpus can be generalized to give better results.

We call this the decoding problem . We can observe the word sequence but the sequence of tags is hidden. We're required to find out the most probable tag sequence given the word sequence. In other words, we wish to maximize \(P(t^{n}|w^{n})\) for an n-word sequence.

An important insight is that parts of speech (and not words) give language its structure. Thus, using Bayes' Rule, we recast the problem to the following form, \(P(t^{n}|w^{n})=P(w^{n}|t^{n})\,P(t^{n})/P(w^{n})\). \(P(w^{n}|t^{n})\) is called likelihood . \(P(t^{n})\) is called prior probability .

Since we're maximizing over all tag sequences, the denominator can be ignored. We also make two assumptions: each word depends only on its own tag, and each tag depends only on its previous tag. We therefore need to maximize \(\prod_{i=1}^{n}P(w_i^{n}|t_i^{n})\,P(t_i|t_{i-1})\). In HMM , the terms are called emission probabilities and transition probabilities.

These probabilities are estimated from the tagged text corpus. The standard solution is to apply Viterbi algorithm , which is a form of dynamic programming. In the example figure, we see two non-zero paths and we select the more probable one.

In any supervised statistical approach, it's recommended to divide your corpus into training set, development set (for tuning parameters) and testing set. An alternative is to use the entire corpus for training but do cross-validation . Moreover, if the corpus is too general the probabilities may not suit a particular domain; if it's too narrow, it may not generalize well across domains. To analyse where your model is failing, you can use confusion matrix or contingency table.

When unknown words are seen, one approach is to assign a suffix and calculate the probability that the suffixed word with a particular tag occurs in a sequence. Another approach is to assign a set of default tags and calculate the probabilities. Or we could look at the word's internal structure, such as assigning NNS for words ending in 's'.

To deal with sparse data (probabilities are zero), there are smoothing techniques. A naïve technique is to add a small frequency count, say 1, to all counts. The Good-Turing method along with Katz's backoff is a better technique. Linear interpolation is another technique.

Learner English is English as a foreign language. Such text often contain spelling and orthographic errors. The use of neural networks, Bidirectional LSTM in particular, is found to give better accuracy than standard POS taggers. Word embeddings, character embeddings and native language vectors are used.

Historical English also present tagging challenges due to differences in spelling, usage and vocabulary. A combination of spelling normalization and a domain adaptation method such as feature embedding gives better results. Other approaches to historical text include neural nets, conditional random fields and self-learning techniques.

Techniques have been invented to tag Twitter data that's often sparse and noisy. In mathematics, POS taggers have been adapted to handle formulae and extract key phrases in mathematical publications. For clinical text, tagged corpus for that genre is used. However, it was found that it's better to share annotations across corpora than simply share a pretrained model.

In Python, nltk.tag package implements many types of taggers. pattern is a web mining module that includes ability to do POS tagging. Unfortunately it lacks Python 3 support. It's also available in R as pattern.nlp . TextBlob is inspired by both NLTK and Pattern. spaCy is another useful package.

Implemented in TensorFlow, SyntaxNet is based on neural networks. Parsey McParseface is a parser for English and gives good accuracy.

Parts-of-speech.info is an online tool for trying out POS tagging for any text input. Useful open source tools are Apache OpenNLP , Orange and UDPipe .

Samet Çetin shows how to implement your own custom tagger using a logistic regression model. There's also a commercial tool from Bitext .

Datacube at the Vienna University of Economics and Business is a place to download text corpora, and taggers (OpenNLP or Stanford) implemented in R. Stanford tagger is said to be slow. Treetagger is limited to non-commercial use. Another R package is RDRPOS tagger . A Java implementation of a log-linear tagger from Stanford is available.

Klein and Simmons describe a rule-based method with a focus towards initial categorical tagging rather than part-of-speech disambiguation. They identify 30 categories and achieve 90% accuracy, which may be because fewer categories implies less ambiguity.

W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera at the Department of Linguistics, Brown University, publish a computer-readable general corpus to aid linguistic research on modern English. The corpus has 1 million words (500 samples of about 2000 words each). Revised editions appear later in 1971 and 1979. Called Brown Corpus , it inspires many other text corpora. Brown Corpus is available online .

Greene and Rubin develop the TAGGIT system to tag the Brown Corpus from a set of 86 tags. It uses rules for tagging and obtains 77% accuracy. Human experts then do post-editing.

In one of the earliest departures from rule-based method to statistical method, Bahl and Mercer apply HMM to the problem of POS tagging and use Viterbi algorithm for decoding. In 1992, a research team at Xerox led by Doug Cutting apply HMM in two ways: they apply the Baum-Welch algorithm to obtain the maximum likelihood estimate of the model parameters; next they apply Viterbi algorithm to decode a sequence of tags given a sequence of words.

The CLAWS algorithm uses the co-locational probabilities , that is, likelihood of co-occurrence of ordered pairs of tags. These probabilities are estimated from the tagged Brown Corpus. Steven J. DeRose improves on this work in 1988 with the VOLSUNGA algorithm that's more efficient and achieves 96% accuracy. CLAWS and VOLSUNGA are N-gram taggers. By late 1980s, statistical approaches become popular. Rather than build complex and brittle hand-coded rules, statistical models learn these rules from text corpora.

Started in 1989 at the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Treebank is released in 1992. It's an annotated text corpus of 4.5 million words of American English. The corpus is POS tagged. Over half of it is also annotated with syntactic structure. Treebank II is released in 1995. The original release had 48 tags. Treebank II merges some punctuation tags and results in a 45-tag tagset. Apart from POS tags, the corpus includes chunk tags, relation tags and anchor tags.

At a time when stochastic taggers are performing better than rule-based taggers, Eric Brill proposes a rule-based tagger that performs as well as stochastic taggers. It works by assigning the most likely estimates from a corpus but without any contextual information. It then improves on the estimate by applying patching rules, which are also learned from the corpus. One test shows 5.1% error rate with only 71 patches. This method is later named Transformation-Based Learning ( TBL ) .

Called Net-Tagger, Helmut Schmid uses a Multi-Layer Perceptron ( MLP ) network to solve the POS tagging problem. He notes that neural networks were used previously for speech recognition. Though Nakamura et al. (1990) used a 4-layer feed-forward network for tag prediction, Net-Tagger is about tag disambiguation rather than prediction. Accuracy of 96.22% is achieved with a 2-layer model.

Maximum Entropy Model was previously used for problems such as language modelling and machine translation. A. Ratnaparkhi applies the model to POS tagging and achieves state-of-the-art word accuracy of 96.6%; and 85.6% for unknown words. OpenNLP POS tagger uses such a model.

Christopher Manning, NLP researcher at Stanford University, comments that POS tagging has reached 97.3% token accuracy and 56% sentence accuracy. Further gains in accuracy might be possible with improved descriptive linguistics. He also argues that accuracy of 97% claimed to be achieved by humans might be an overestimate. Thus, automatic taggers are already surpassing humans.

Since 2015, many neural network based POS taggers have shown better than 97% accuracy. In 2018, Meta-BiLSTM achieves an accuracy of 97.96%.

Sample Code

• # Source: https://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev/quickstart.html#part-of-speech-tagging # Accessed: 2019-09-06   >>> from textblob import TextBlob >>> wiki = TextBlob ( "Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language." ) >>> wiki. tags [ ( 'Python' , 'NNP' ) , ( 'is' , 'VBZ' ) , ( 'a' , 'DT' ) , ( 'high-level' , 'JJ' ) , ( 'general-purpose' , 'JJ' ) , ( 'programming' , 'NN' ) , ( 'language' , 'NN' ) ]     # Source: https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.tag.html # Accessed: 2019-09-06   >>> from nltk. tag import DefaultTagger >>> default_tagger = DefaultTagger ( 'NN' ) >>> list ( default_tagger. tag ( 'This is a test' . split ( ) ) ) [ ( 'This' , 'NN' ) , ( 'is' , 'NN' ) , ( 'a' , 'NN' ) , ( 'test' , 'NN' ) ]     # Source: https://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/pattern # Accessed: 2019-09-06   >>> from pattern. en import parse >>> s = 'The mobile web is more important than mobile apps.' >>> parse ( s , relations = True , lemmata = True ) u 'The/DT/B-NP/O/NP-SBJ-1 mobile/JJ/I-NP/O/NP-SBJ-1 web/NN/I-NP/O/NP-SBJ-1 is/VBZ/B-VP/O/VP-1 more/RBR/B-ADJP/O/O important/JJ/I-ADJP/O/O than/IN/B-PP/B-PNP/O mobile/JJ/B-NP/I-PNP/O apps/NN/I-NP/I-PNP/O ././O/O/O'     # Source: https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#pos-tagging # Accessed: 2019-09-06   import spacy   nlp = spacy. load ( 'en_core_web_sm' ) doc = nlp ( u 'Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion' )   for token in doc: print ( token . text , token . lemma_ , token . pos_ , token . tag_ , token . dep_ , token . shape_ , token . is_alpha , token . is_stop )  
• Artzi, Yoav. 2017. "Sequence Prediction and Part-of-speech Tagging." CS5740: Natural Language Processing, Cornell University. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Brill, Eric. 1992. "A simple rule-based part of speech tagger." Proceedings of the third conference on applied natural language processing, ACL, Trento, Italy, March 31-April 03, pp. 152-155. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• CLiPS. 2018a. "Pattern." CLiPS Research Center, June 22. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• CLiPS. 2018b. "Penn Treebank II tag set." CLiPS Research Center, June 22. Accessed 2019-09-07.
• Cutting, Doug, Julian Kupiec, Jan Pedersen, and Penelope Sibun. 1992. "A practical part-of-speech tagger." Proceedings of the third conference on applied natural language processing, ACL, Trento, Italy, March 31-April 03, pp. 133-140. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Daelemans, Walter, Jakub Zavrel, Peter Berck, and Steven Gillis. 1996. "MBT: A Memory-Based Part of Speech Tagger-Generator." Fourth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, ACL Anthology. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• DeRose, Steven J. 1988. "Grammatical category disambiguation by statistical optimization." J. Computational Linguistics, vol. 14, no. 1, Pages 31-39, MIT Press Cambridge. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Derczynski, Leon, Alan Ritter, Sam Clark, and Kalina Bontcheva. 2013. "Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagging for All:Overcoming Sparse and Noisy Data". Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Hissar, Bulgaria, September 7-13, pp. 198–206. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Fan, Jung-wei, Rashmi Prasad, Rommel M. Yabut, Richard M. Loomis, Daniel S. Zisook, John E. Mattison, and Yang Huang. 2011. "Part-of-speech tagging for clinical text: wall or bridge between institutions?" AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011, pp. 382–391. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Ferraro, Jeffrey P, Hal Daumé, III, Scott L DuVall, Wendy W Chapman, Henk Harkema, and Peter J Haug. 2013. "Improving performance of natural language processing part-of-speech tagging on clinical narratives through domain adaptation." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 20, no. 5, September, pp. 931–939. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Geitgey, Adam. 2018. "Natural Language Processing is Fun!" Medium, July 18. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Jones, M. Tim. 2017. "Speaking out loud: An introduction to natural language processing." IBM Developer, June 13. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Jurafsky, Daniel and James H. Martin. 2009. "Part-of-Speech Tagging." Chapter 5 in Speech and Language Processing, Second Edition, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Accessed 2019-09-07.
• Kauhanen, Henri. 2011. "The Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English (the Brown Corpus)." VARI­ENG, University of Helsinki, March 20. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Lee, Seungjae Ryan. 2019. "AIND: 20. Hidden Markov Models." endtoendAI. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Manning, Christopher D. 2011. "Part-of-speech tagging from 97% to 100%: is it time for some linguistics?" Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing - Volume Part I, pp. 171-189, Tokyo, Japan, Springer-Verlag Berlin, February 20-26. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Marcus, Mitch. 2011. "A Brief History of the Penn Treebank." Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, February 15. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Marcus, Mitchell P., Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz, and Beatrice Santorini. 1993. "Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank." Journal Computational Linguistics - Special issue on using large corpora: II, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 313-330, MIT Press Cambridge, MA. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Màrquez, Lluís, Lluís Padró, and Horacio Rodríguez. 2000. "A Machine Learning Approach to POS Tagging." Machine Learning, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 59-91, Kluwer Academic Publishers, April. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Nagata, Ryo, Tomoya Mizumoto, Yuta Kikuchi, Yoshifumi Kawasaki, and Kotaro Funakoshi. 2018. "A POS Tagging Model Designed for Learner English." Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 4th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 39–48, Brussels, Belgium, November 01. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Naseem, Tahira, Benjamin Snyder, Jacob Eisenstein, and Regina Barzilay. 2009. "Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging: Two Unsupervised Approaches." Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, vol. 36, pp. 1-45, AI Access Foundation. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Neves, Mariana. 2015. "Part-of-speech tagging and named-entity recognition." Natural Language Processing, Hasso Plattner Institute, May 11. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Nguyen, Dat Quoc and Karin Verspoor. 2018. "An improved neural network model for joint POS tagging and dependency parsing." Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pp. 81–91, Brussels, Belgium, Association for Computational Linguistics, October 31 – November 1. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Petrov, Slav. 2016. "Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source." Google AI Blog, May 12. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• R-bloggers. 2017. "Natural Language Processing on 40 languages with the Ripple Down Rules-based Part-Of-Speech Tagger." R-bloggers, March 30. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Ratnaparkhi, Adwait. 1996. "A Maximum Entropy Model for Part-Of-Speech Tagging." Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 133-142, May. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Ruder, Sebastian. 2019. "Part-of-speech tagging." NLP-progress, via GitHub, August 30. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Schmid, Helmut. 1994. "Part-of-speech tagging with neural networks." Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, ACL, vol. 1, pp. 172-176, August 5-9. Accessed 2019-09-08.
• Schulz, Sarah, and Jonas Kuhn. 2016. "Learning from Within? Comparing PoS Tagging Approaches for Historical Text." Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 4316-4322, May. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Schöneberg, Ulf, and Wolfram Sperber. 2014. "POS Tagging and its Applications for Mathematics." arXiv, June 11. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• Shanmugamani, Rajalingappaa, and Rajesh Arumugam. 2018. "Applications of POS tagging." Hands-On Natural Language Processing with Python, Packt Publishing, July. Accessed 2019-08-31.
• TextBlob. 2018. "TextBlob: Simplified Text Processing." Release v0.15.2, November 21. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Titov, Ivan. 2015. "Lecture 4: Smoothing, Part-of-Speech Tagging." Natural Language Models and Interfaces, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Accessed 2019-09-08.
• Webber, Bonnie. 2007. "Part of Speech Tagging." Informatics 2A: Lecture 13, University of Edinburgh, October 16. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Yang, Yi and Jacob Eisenstein. 2016. "Part-of-Speech Tagging for Historical English." Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2016, San Diego, California, Association for Computational Linguistic, pp. 1318–1328, June 12-17. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• van Guilder, Linda. 1995. "Automated Part of Speech Tagging: A Brief Overview." LING361, Georgetown University. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Çetin, Samet. 2018. "Part-Of-Speech (POS) Tagging." Medium, July 28. Accessed 2019-09-06.

Further Reading

• Malhotra, Sachin and Divya Godayal. 2018. "An introduction to part-of-speech tagging and the Hidden Markov Model." freeCodeCamp, June 8. Accessed 2019-09-08.
• Bird, Steven, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper. 2019. "Categorizing and Tagging Words." Chapter 5 in Natural Language Processing with Python, Version 3.0. Accessed 2019-09-06.
• Santorini, Beatrice. 1990. "Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project." 3rd Revision, MS-CIS-90-47, LINC LAB 178,University of Pennsylvania. July. Accessed 2019-09-08.
• Honnibal, Matthew. 2013. "A Good Part-of-Speech Tagger in about 200 Lines of Python." Blog, Explosion, September 18. Accessed 2019-09-06.

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An introduction to part-of-speech tagging and the Hidden Markov Model

by Divya Godayal

by Sachin Malhotra and Divya Godayal

Let’s go back into the times when we had no language to communicate. The only way we had was sign language. That’s how we usually communicate with our dog at home, right? When we tell him, “We love you, Jimmy,” he responds by wagging his tail. This doesn’t mean he knows what we are actually saying. Instead, his response is simply because he understands the language of emotions and gestures more than words.

We as humans have developed an understanding of a lot of nuances of the natural language more than any animal on this planet. That is why when we say “I LOVE you, honey” vs when we say “Lets make LOVE, honey” we mean different things. Since we understand the basic difference between the two phrases, our responses are very different. It is these very intricacies in natural language understanding that we want to teach to a machine.

What this could mean is when your future robot dog hears “I love you, Jimmy”, he would know LOVE is a Verb. He would also realize that it’s an emotion that we are expressing to which he would respond in a certain way. And maybe when you are telling your partner “Lets make LOVE”, the dog would just stay out of your business ?.

This is just an example of how teaching a robot to communicate in a language known to us can make things easier.

The primary use case being highlighted in this example is how important it is to understand the difference in the usage of the word LOVE, in different contexts.

Part-of-Speech Tagging

From a very small age, we have been made accustomed to identifying part of speech tags. For example, reading a sentence and being able to identify what words act as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and so on. All these are referred to as the part of speech tags.

Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition for them:

In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging ( POS tagging or PoS tagging or POST ), also called grammatical tagging or word-category disambiguation , is the process of marking up a word in a text (corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition and its context — i.e., its relationship with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. A simplified form of this is commonly taught to school-age children, in the identification of words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Identifying part of speech tags is much more complicated than simply mapping words to their part of speech tags. This is because POS tagging is not something that is generic. It is quite possible for a single word to have a different part of speech tag in different sentences based on different contexts. That is why it is impossible to have a generic mapping for POS tags.

As you can see, it is not possible to manually find out different part-of-speech tags for a given corpus. New types of contexts and new words keep coming up in dictionaries in various languages, and manual POS tagging is not scalable in itself. That is why we rely on machine-based POS tagging.

Before proceeding further and looking at how part-of-speech tagging is done, we should look at why POS tagging is necessary and where it can be used.

Why Part-of-Speech tagging?

Part-of-Speech tagging in itself may not be the solution to any particular NLP problem. It is however something that is done as a pre-requisite to simplify a lot of different problems. Let us consider a few applications of POS tagging in various NLP tasks.

Text to Speech Conversion

Let us look at the following sentence:

The word refuse is being used twice in this sentence and has two different meanings here. refUSE (/ rəˈfyo͞oz/)is a verb meaning “deny,” while REFuse(/ ˈrefˌyo͞os/) is a noun meaning “trash” (that is, they are not homophones). Thus, we need to know which word is being used in order to pronounce the text correctly. (For this reason, text-to-speech systems usually perform POS-tagging.)

Have a look at the part-of-speech tags generated for this very sentence by the NLTK package.

As we can see from the results provided by the NLTK package, POS tags for both refUSE and REFuse are different. Using these two different POS tags for our text to speech converter can come up with a different set of sounds.

Similarly, let us look at yet another classical application of POS tagging: word sense disambiguation.

Word Sense Disambiguation

Let’s talk about this kid called Peter. Since his mother is a neurological scientist, she didn’t send him to school. His life was devoid of science and math.

One day she conducted an experiment, and made him sit for a math class. Even though he didn’t have any prior subject knowledge, Peter thought he aced his first test. His mother then took an example from the test and published it as below. (Kudos to her!)

Words often occur in different senses as different parts of speech. For example:

• She saw a bear.
• Your efforts will bear fruit.

The word bear in the above sentences has completely different senses, but more importantly one is a noun and other is a verb. Rudimentary word sense disambiguation is possible if you can tag words with their POS tags.

Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is identifying which sense of a word (that is, which meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings.

Try to think of the multiple meanings for this sentence:

Time flies like an arrow

Here are the various interpretations of the given sentence. The meaning and hence the part-of-speech might vary for each word.

As we can clearly see, there are multiple interpretations possible for the given sentence. Different interpretations yield different kinds of part of speech tags for the words.This information, if available to us, can help us find out the exact version / interpretation of the sentence and then we can proceed from there.

The above example shows us that a single sentence can have three different POS tag sequences assigned to it that are equally likely. That means that it is very important to know what specific meaning is being conveyed by the given sentence whenever it’s appearing. This is word sense disambiguation, as we are trying to find out THE sequence.

These are just two of the numerous applications where we would require POS tagging. There are other applications as well which require POS tagging, like Question Answering, Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, and so on.

Now that we have a basic knowledge of different applications of POS tagging, let us look at how we can go about actually assigning POS tags to all the words in our corpus.

Types of POS taggers

POS-tagging algorithms fall into two distinctive groups:

• Rule-Based POS Taggers
• Stochastic POS Taggers

E. Brill’s tagger , one of the first and most widely used English POS-taggers, employs rule-based algorithms. Let us first look at a very brief overview of what rule-based tagging is all about.

Rule-Based Tagging

Automatic part of speech tagging is an area of natural language processing where statistical techniques have been more successful than rule-based methods.

Typical rule-based approaches use contextual information to assign tags to unknown or ambiguous words. Disambiguation is done by analyzing the linguistic features of the word, its preceding word, its following word, and other aspects.

For example, if the preceding word is an article, then the word in question must be a noun. This information is coded in the form of rules.

Example of a rule:

If an ambiguous/unknown word X is preceded by a determiner and followed by a noun, tag it as an adjective.

Defining a set of rules manually is an extremely cumbersome process and is not scalable at all. So we need some automatic way of doing this.

The Brill’s tagger is a rule-based tagger that goes through the training data and finds out the set of tagging rules that best define the data and minimize POS tagging errors. The most important point to note here about Brill’s tagger is that the rules are not hand-crafted, but are instead found out using the corpus provided. The only feature engineering required is a set of rule templates that the model can use to come up with new features.

Let’s move ahead now and look at Stochastic POS tagging.

Stochastic Part-of-Speech Tagging

The term ‘stochastic tagger’ can refer to any number of different approaches to the problem of POS tagging. Any model which somehow incorporates frequency or probability may be properly labelled stochastic.

The simplest stochastic taggers disambiguate words based solely on the probability that a word occurs with a particular tag. In other words, the tag encountered most frequently in the training set with the word is the one assigned to an ambiguous instance of that word. The problem with this approach is that while it may yield a valid tag for a given word, it can also yield inadmissible sequences of tags.

An alternative to the word frequency approach is to calculate the probability of a given sequence of tags occurring. This is sometimes referred to as the n-gram approach, referring to the fact that the best tag for a given word is determined by the probability that it occurs with the n previous tags. This approach makes much more sense than the one defined before, because it considers the tags for individual words based on context.

The next level of complexity that can be introduced into a stochastic tagger combines the previous two approaches, using both tag sequence probabilities and word frequency measurements. This is known as the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) .

Before proceeding with what is a Hidden Markov Model, let us first look at what is a Markov Model. That will better help understand the meaning of the term Hidden in HMMs.

Markov Model

Say that there are only three kinds of weather conditions, namely

Now, since our young friend we introduced above, Peter, is a small kid, he loves to play outside. He loves it when the weather is sunny, because all his friends come out to play in the sunny conditions.

He hates the rainy weather for obvious reasons.

Every day, his mother observe the weather in the morning (that is when he usually goes out to play) and like always, Peter comes up to her right after getting up and asks her to tell him what the weather is going to be like. Since she is a responsible parent, she want to answer that question as accurately as possible. But the only thing she has is a set of observations taken over multiple days as to how weather has been.

How does she make a prediction of the weather for today based on what the weather has been for the past N days?

Say you have a sequence. Something like this:

Sunny, Rainy, Cloudy, Cloudy, Sunny, Sunny, Sunny, Rainy

So, the weather for any give day can be in any of the three states.

Let’s say we decide to use a Markov Chain Model to solve this problem. Now using the data that we have, we can construct the following state diagram with the labelled probabilities.

In order to compute the probability of today’s weather given N previous observations, we will use the Markovian Property.

Markov Chain is essentially the simplest known Markov model, that is it obeys the Markov property.

The Markov property suggests that the distribution for a random variable in the future depends solely only on its distribution in the current state, and none of the previous states have any impact on the future states.

For a much more detailed explanation of the working of Markov chains, refer to this link.

Also, have a look at the following example just to see how probability of the current state can be computed using the formula above, taking into account the Markovian Property.

Apply the Markov property in the following example.

We can clearly see that as per the Markov property, the probability of tomorrow's weather being Sunny depends solely on today's weather and not on yesterday's .

Let us now proceed and see what is hidden in the Hidden Markov Models.

Hidden Markov Model

It’s the small kid Peter again, and this time he’s gonna pester his new caretaker — which is you. (Ooopsy!!)

As a caretaker, one of the most important tasks for you is to tuck Peter into bed and make sure he is sound asleep. Once you’ve tucked him in, you want to make sure he’s actually asleep and not up to some mischief.

You cannot, however, enter the room again, as that would surely wake Peter up. So all you have to decide are the noises that might come from the room. Either the room is quiet or there is noise coming from the room. These are your states.

Peter’s mother, before leaving you to this nightmare, said:

May the sound be with you :)

His mother has given you the following state diagram. The diagram has some states, observations, and probabilities.

Note that there is no direct correlation between sound from the room and Peter being asleep.

There are two kinds of probabilities that we can see from the state diagram.

• One is the emission probabilities, which represent the probabilities of making certain observations given a particular state. For example, we have P(noise | awake) = 0.5 . This is an emission probability.
• The other ones is transition probabilities, which represent the probability of transitioning to another state given a particular state. For example, we have P(asleep | awake) = 0.4 . This is a transition probability.

The Markovian property applies in this model as well. So do not complicate things too much. Markov, your savior said:

Don’t go too much into the history…

The Markov property, as would be applicable to the example we have considered here, would be that the probability of Peter being in a state depends ONLY on the previous state.

But there is a clear flaw in the Markov property. If Peter has been awake for an hour, then the probability of him falling asleep is higher than if has been awake for just 5 minutes. So, history matters. Therefore, the Markov state machine-based model is not completely correct. It’s merely a simplification.

The Markov property, although wrong, makes this problem very tractable.

We usually observe longer stretches of the child being awake and being asleep. If Peter is awake now, the probability of him staying awake is higher than of him going to sleep. Hence, the 0.6 and 0.4 in the above diagram. P(awake | awake) = 0.6 and P(asleep | awake) = 0.4

Before actually trying to solve the problem at hand using HMMs, let’s relate this model to the task of Part of Speech Tagging.

HMMs for Part of Speech Tagging

We know that to model any problem using a Hidden Markov Model we need a set of observations and a set of possible states. The states in an HMM are hidden.

In the part of speech tagging problem, the observations are the words themselves in the given sequence.

As for the states , which are hidden, these would be the POS tags for the words.

The transition probabilities would be somewhat like P(VP | NP) that is, what is the probability of the current word having a tag of Verb Phrase given that the previous tag was a Noun Phrase.

Emission probabilities would be P(john | NP) or P(will | VP) that is, what is the probability that the word is, say, John given that the tag is a Noun Phrase.

Note that this is just an informal modeling of the problem to provide a very basic understanding of how the Part of Speech tagging problem can be modeled using an HMM.

How do we solve this?

Coming back to our problem of taking care of Peter.

Irritated are we ? ?.

Our problem here was that we have an initial state: Peter was awake when you tucked him into bed. After that, you recorded a sequence of observations, namely noise or quiet, at different time-steps. Using these set of observations and the initial state, you want to find out whether Peter would be awake or asleep after say N time steps.

We draw all possible transitions starting from the initial state. There’s an exponential number of branches that come out as we keep moving forward. So the model grows exponentially after a few time steps. Even without considering any observations. Have a look at the model expanding exponentially below.

If we had a set of states, we could calculate the probability of the sequence. But we don’t have the states. All we have are a sequence of observations. This is why this model is referred to as the Hidden Markov Model — because the actual states over time are hidden.

So, caretaker, if you’ve come this far it means that you have at least a fairly good understanding of how the problem is to be structured. All that is left now is to use some algorithm / technique to actually solve the problem. For now, Congratulations on Leveling up!

In the next article of this two-part series, we will see how we can use a well defined algorithm known as the Viterbi Algorithm to decode the given sequence of observations given the model. See you there!

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