If you deliberately try to avoid said, you run the risk that your writing will reflect that intention. I agree, and I recommend you embrace it! If someone’s told you to avoid repeating said, head for your bookshelf and take a peek inside some of your favourite novels for reassurance. This helps to make the dialogue realistic by keeping its superstructure invisible,’ say Mittelmark and Newman in How Not to Write a Novel (p. The speech tag said ‘is a convention so firmly established that readers for the most part do not even see it. Why said often works best, and when it’s not enough A good tag doesn’t impair how natural the speech sounds.A good tag doesn’t repeat what the dialogue’s already told the reader.Rather than give you a bunch of zombie rules that you’ll want to break about two seconds after you’ve read them, here are three guidelines to bear in mind when thinking about which tags to use, which to avoid, and when you might omit them altogether: Placed in between direct speech, tags can moderate the pace by forcing the reader to pause, and improve the rhythm by breaking up longer chunks. ‘That’s the last thing I expected you to say,’ Dave said..‘That,’ said Dave, ‘is the last thing I expected you to say.’.Dave said, ‘That’s the last thing I expected you to say.’.A dialogue tag can come before, between or after direct speech:

Dialogue tags in first person