![]() ![]() 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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