Dialogue Tags & Redundancy

Dialogue tags are a wonderful thing. They tell us who’s speaking, how they’re speaking, and allows us to attach descriptions without having to start a whole new sentence. “Said” is great, special descriptors like “screamed” and “yelped” are great, too. Just like with emphasis formatting, sometimes we get wrapped up in these little things without realizing our own problem: redundancy.

Redundancy is not a favorable quality in writing. The verbs we use as part of our dialogue tags are often used with purpose. We’re trying to put the reader into the scene so they can hear exactly the tone of voice someone speaks with. Unfortunately, when paired with some punctuation marks, they can become silly and unnecessary.

There’s a reason we have all kinds of punctuation available to us. They each provide something for us. Question marks denote, well, questions; exclamations denote something of the tone and emotions of the character speaking; periods are the common-man’s mark that denote the ending of a sentence. Periods are inconspicuous where these others are much more attention-grabbing. Periods allow you to continue reading without interruption. Of course there are other kinds of punctuation, but these are the three we tend to use for dialogue, so I’ll stick with those for now.

Dialogue tags are great, but sometimes they are our worst enemies when trying to trim out the redundancy in our work. “Alice exclaimed,” in the above example is completely unnecessary because the exclamation point already tells us that. Same with “they asked” after a question–no kidding! In general, after a special punctuation mark at the end of dialogue, you won’t need a dialogue tag.

But Pear, how will they know who’s speaking? Scenes have a rhythm, a kind of back-and-forth to them between characters. The rest of your scene will put the line in context for you. Characterization throughout the piece will set up opinions and personality of the characters in a scene. Your word choice, tone, and pacing will help put it in context, too. Your line will also be couched in among other lines of narration and dialogue that may reference back to the line’s speaker.

Strategic placement of paragraph breaks will help do what a dialogue tag would. Paragraph breaks happen in a couple of ways, but it generally comes down to two things: a change of subject or a change in speaker. A line of dialogue doesn’t have to hang out on its own if the following action is performed by the same individual who spoke. Alice spoke, Alice then moved, and thus all Alice actions are part of one paragraph. If Jared had done something in between Alice speaking and Alice moving, he would have gotten his own paragraph:

Dialogue and narration work together. You may want to include those dialogue tags, may even feel obligated to include them, but be sure that what you’re tagging needs it. You’ll hear it from me over and over: Trust your readers to put things together without you laying it out completely.