context or nuance that isn’t conveyed by the dialogue itself or to
clear up an ambiguity.
o Consider this simple example: “‘I love you,’ she said.” In most
cases, the context for this statement is likely to be clear from
the narrative, but it is easy to imagine situations in which that
statement could be spoken in multiple ways by a character or
understood in multiple ways by the reader.o If you don’t want
the declaration to be
ambiguous, you can
clarify it by adding
a more descriptive
verb or an adverb:
“‘I love you,’ she
sobbed”; “‘I love
you,’ she said
casually.” Instead of
altering the dialogue
tag, you might also
italicize one or
more of the words
in the dialogue to
show the speaker’s
emphasis: “‘I love
you,’ she said”; “‘I
love you,’ she said.”Using Dialogue Tags
z Another rule of thumb for
dialogue tags is to use them
sparingly and keep them as simple as possible. The more you can rely
on the speech of the characters to convey the emotion and reveal who’s
saying what, the better. In fact, in general, you should use dialogue tags
only when it would otherwise be impossible to tell who is speaking or
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If you have a conversation between two
characters that goes on for less than a
page, you can probably get away with
identifying the speakers at the beginning,
then not mentioning them again.© Fuse/Thinkstock.