The Invisible Word

So a list of "synonyms" (loosely accurate) for the word 'said' was making rounds on tumblr. I saw a lot of people getting real hyped up about it, to the likes of;  "USE THIS, AUTHORS!" and "gonna print this out a million times and put it up all over my walls!" and "I hate it when authors only use 'said' in a story!"

Well, that's awesome. Great thing to be into writing and expanding your vocabulary. Not so much with this list:

This is the type of list (in fact, it may be the exact list, it looks rather familiar) that got passed out in my grade school class. We then had to write for the rest of the year without using the word 'said'. Ever! Instead, we were to use one of these 'strong verbs'. 'strong verbs' is not actually the term we were told then, that was popular in writing classes later on in life. Perhaps this was just an exercise to expose our young minds to the concept of synonyms - that some words have counterparts that mean basically the same thing! Sure there are nuances in meaning, but you're in the 3rd grade, there's plenty of time to straighten that out later.

This obsession to cancel out "bland" and "nondescriptive" words like said is rampant enough that it's caused a Trope To Be Born. It's called Said Bookisms. I am loathe to link to TVTropes because then you'll go lose hours of your life there, but even just the summary of the trope explains why this list is Bad News. Most of the time.

So, I've fixed the list.

 And here is the post I made accompanying it on tumblr:

SAID IS AN INVISIBLE WORD. You don’t remember reading it, and it can never stick out in the way a ‘strong verb’ does. There is absolutely no reason to ever have an arsenal of 234 other words to substitute for ‘said’. You look like a thirteen year old who just discovered fanfiction.net and a thesaurus. Dialogue tags should be used sparingly anyway, even ’said’. 

Your writing should be strong enough that how something is spoken (and who is speaking it) doesn’t need to be tediously overstated with ‘strong verbs’. 

In fact, half of these were not even synonyms. ‘thought’ is not a replacement for ‘said’. Unless you’re telepathic.

That said, some of these are good words. ‘strong verbs’ can be very effective. But they’re ones that suggest noise, pace, tone and pitch of a voice -not action. It should be obvious from context and dialogue if someone is interrupting. Or repeating words. Or arguing, or explaining. It’s more difficult to tell if a character is moaning. Drawling. Laughing. This is now a list of 65, and even that’s…pushing it. 

All of the people agreeing with the original list and saying how awesome it is are not wrong, because that’s their opinion and opinions can’t be wrong, but maybe they haven’t read anything well-written and had the unfortunate experience of overzealous English teachers who passed out lists like this and forbade students to use ‘said’ because it’s bland and unimaginative. But I tell you, if I read something where a character ‘sanctioned’, ‘itemized’, ‘reciprocated’ or ‘held’ instead of talking, I would stop reading. Instantly.

I wrote something similar a while back on my LJ, in a meta essay about adverbs (which people love to hate on, along with said, and I could do whole other essays on that too).  But strangely, while people are down on adverbs for being 'sloppy' and 'unnecessary', they don't harp on these extraneous dialogue tags for the same thing. Do you really want to read conversations that take place like this:

"Said Bookism?" Alice interrogated. "What's that?"
"Well," Bob exposited, "it's a variety of Purple Prose in which the writer goes out of their way to avoid the word said."
"Why would they do this?" ejaculated Alice.
"Because," explicated Bob, "it was the fashion at one point. There were even 'said books' you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of said as saying said was discredited during that time. That's where the name of the trope comes from," he further proclaimed.

Because that's what you can get. And it's awful. It's unpalatable and juvenile, amateur and laughable. No one will take you seriously. But I've seen things written that way. Serious things. All because of that list your teacher passed around in the 3rd grade, and because people have told you to hate poor little 'said', who only wants to sit there quietly near to your dialogue and be a helpful friend, and maybe occasionally invite along a well-behaved adverb to sit beside it.

So yes. Dialogue tags that are not 'said' can be used. Effectively. But in the end, your tags should not be upstaging the dialogue. And that's what words like "acknowledged", "reminisced", "denounced", and "propounded" do. It's also what an onslaught of adverbs can do. Overindulging in anything is not a good practice. It's moderation that makes strong writing. But 'said' almost can't be overused. Should you use it every single time a character speaks? Probably not. But since 'said' is an invisible word to read, it's also an invisible word to write. You almost forget you've used it so much. But, unlike if you used "howled" 178 times, "demanded" 323 times, "argued" 415 times and "explained" 267 times, nobody's going to really notice if said creeps in there more often then it should have been.