Quick Post!

Just a short Blog Post today because I’m on vacation up at my cottage on Lake Huron. What I’d like to talk about is the proper way, in my mind, to use dialogue tags.

There are a few possibilities for dialogue tags:

“He escaped from the restaurant,” Said Harry. (Said Noun)

“He didn’t get very far,” Hermione said. (Noun Said)

“Well he should’ve just stayed – they wouldn’t have found him!” He said. (Pronoun Said)

“Yes they would’ve!” said she. (Said Pronoun)

These are the four possibilities I see for dialogue tags, and though each has a narrative purpose which I’ll cover in a moment, some are in my view simply more correct. ‘Said she’ sounds awkward and I would argue that so does ‘Said Harry.’ This has not stopped Rowling from using the latter in almost all cases. In general, the narrative purpose of dialogue tags is to pull the reader’s eye towards a single element of the dialogue tag. In ‘Said Harry’ the focus, for the reader, is left on the character on the end of each line – this form of dialogue tag leaves the reader’s eye on the character who is speaking, and thus the importance is placed on who is saying a word, not how they are saying it. With ‘Pronoun said,’ or ‘Noun said,’ the power of the sentence is left on the manner by which something is being said – in other words, authors who like to add larger dialogue tags should be using pronoun, or noun first, and authors with a focus on the character which is speaking should be using noun or pronoun second.

This is not to say that as an author you should be choosing a dialogue tag for each specific instance: I would recommend that you choose either noun/pronoun second, or noun/pronoun first, and stick with it, but there are certain writing styles that benefit from the use of one mode or another. Rowling’s writing especially (and I may get a lot of internet hate for this next comment) is very character focused to the point where dialogue is flavoured by the character who is saying it. If you put Neville at the end of a dialogue tag you have a nervous statement, and if you put Hermione at the end of a dialogue tag you have a smart-ass comment: Rowling never needs to explain how her characters are speaking because each character speaks in only one manner. Authors who create more three-dimensional characters require dialogue tags that depict how the character is acting at the time, and should thus be using the pronoun/noun first format.

And, to avoid all this hassle, use dialogue tags that add movement to a scene, rather than just prolonging a conversation: 

“I struck the sword from his hand, like so,” Harry demonstrated, chopping in a downward arc with his wand. (noun/pronoun first)

“I struck the sword from his hand, like so,” said Harry demonstrating by chopping in a downward arc with his wand. (noun/pronoun second)

Examples like this are where I see noun/pronoun first as the better dialogue tag, in the case above the action in the scene is preserved in the first example, and slowed in the second. Now, because I want to get back to vacationing, I am going to break down very simply how I see each of the dialogue tags: perhaps in the future I will flesh this out more thoroughly: 

“He escaped from the restaurant,” Said Harry. (Said Noun) [Has the advantage of placing the focus on the character and thus creating an amount of characterization through the simple process of more clearly attributing certain statements to certain individuals. Can be used to slow down the narratives so that pacing is more controlled and varied within a work.]

“He didn’t get very far,” Hermione said. (Noun Said) [Very definite, good for longer conversations, and able to be expanded to add depth to a character’s intonation, without relieving tension or slowing the pace of a narrative.]

“Well he should’ve just stayed – they wouldn’t have found him!” He said. (Pronoun Said) [Cuts dialogue tags down to their minimum and preserves the momentum of a conversation.]

“Yes they would’ve!” said she. (Said Pronoun) [Is, in most cases, simply incorrect. Could be used well in a poem to preserve a rhyming scheme, but bothers me, and some other literary buffs when used exclusively within a prose text.]