There wasn't any apricot jam left, but his stomach felt a little upset anyway. You don't usually need a tag at the end of a paragraph if the speaker is obvious. If everyone's speaking three or four sentences at a time, it can be a little easier to forget who is speaking, since you're giving the reader a lot more context to recall. Your father and I will be home by ten."Ĭaution: the longer the dialogue, the more you may need to insert a tag. "There's a rotisserie chicken in the fridge." Here's an example of non-tags between two people: To streamline your story, you don't always want to waste a couple sentences on useless detail. If it's unclear whether Bob or Sarah spoke first, then you'll run into the same problem as having no tags.Ī perk of having small bursts of dialogue with no tags is that it reads quickly. If the reader knows Bob definitely spoke first, they'll immediately be able to understand that Sarah replied. Some good advice for short bursts of non-tags between two people: make sure it's clear who is speaking first. You want people to read parts of your story over because they're really good, not because they got lost, confused, or don't understand something. All it takes is one interruption, one glance away from the page to swat a mosquito or to greet their mom, and the reader can lose their spot and the speaker. Once that number gets up past five, however, the rate at which people get confused jumps considerably. Most people can easily read three or four shifts without trouble. You don't need a tag every time someone speaks! Often, if there are only two speakers, it is okay to go a couple lines (think three max, maybe four) without a tag.
There are times where you can skip a tag. So, to fix our scene above to make it clear who is speaking and when, we need dialogue tags.īut we aren't going to rush in and add a he/she/Name said to every line. Without the tags in those stories, I literally can't tell who is saying what. On Wattpad, I see a lot of dialogue that could have been said by any character because all characters sound the same.
Now, if you're really good with dialogue or your characters sound really different (say Speaker 1 is British and uses different vocabulary speaker 3 swears every other word or something), you could make this scene understandable without a single tag.īut a lot of beginning writers, even a lot of experienced writers, haven't quite gotten there yet, and sometimes no matter how a character might sound, they say something so generic it can be attributed to anyone. Did Speaker 1 or 2 go next? And then did Speaker 3 or Speaker 1 or 2 (depending on who you picked in the above line) reply? You can probably figure out the first three lines on your own (one per person) but the last two lines are completely up for debate. "There's six hours until sunrise we'll be fine."
The night's fading and we've got a job to do." Carefully inserted, they can also be used to help imitate speech patterns. Dialogue tags are more than just he/she said. In a higher sense, they can help order the scene by providing where/when and supplying context to what's being spoken. Basically, their job is to attribute speech to a specific character. This is a pretty common phrase found in writing, and I wanted to make sure that we are on the same page when I refer to it in later chapters.ĭialogue tags are one of the most common elements of writing.
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