A Quick Guide to Using Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags may sound necessary, but they often slow down the dialogue instead of enhancing it. Here are a few tips on keeping them useful and under control.

Dialogue tags are those short sentences following a line of dialogue that tells us who’s speaking. They are called ‘tags’ because they are generally very short and specify the main sentence, which is the line of dialogue.
The job of a dialogue tag is to let the reader know who’s talking. This is its main job.
By keeping the movement straight in the reader’s mind, tags make dialogue clearer and easier to follow.
Dialogue is a very powerful narrative tool because they express the words of the characters without filters. They are given to the reader as they are. Readers are free to interpreter them, and therefore to be more involved in the story. But if the dialogue is confusing, that tool will become powerless.

The use of tags may be less straightforward than one would think.

Let’s have a closer look.

It’s the most common form of tag. It simply specifies who’s talking, with no flourish.

It’s a very short sentence, and often only the information lingers in the reader’s mind rather than the actual sentence. In fact, it is widely accepted that the use of ‘say’ as a dialogue tag is practically invisible to readers because it is so commonplace, almost granted. For this reason, this use of the dialogue tag hardly disturbs the dialogue.

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