He said, she said…a dialogue which runs short on speech verbs quickly becomes dull and repetitive. When in that magic condition of creative flow, we only marginally pay attention to the tags, the part of dialogue which expresses just how the character said, and usually write down the more familiar ones: once our characters replied, remarked, exclaimed, asked, answered, added, and maybe suggested and noted whatever they had to note, we feel we can pretty safely use “said” a couple more times.
Now, I’m the first to say the prince of dialogue, “say” is the most unobtrusive and neutral of all tags, and I am in no way trying to encourage you to chump up your text with every single one of these alternatives, and a sign of good healthy dialogue is when you can actually skip a lot of tags because you have made it clear who is saying what. That said I do believe a little more range is no bad thing, and in those cases where you actually would like to specify exactly how someone uttered something, you can rely on the amazingly vast expressive capability of the English language. Here is my personal and ultimate list of speech verbs. Feel free to scan through it to see how many you already know.
I have provided a brief definition for each speech verb.
Next: speech verbs listed alphabetically. ->
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