(no subject)

[conuly]

Just read a fic where there are no fewer than twelve different dialog tags in a row, not one of which is "said", "asked" or "replied/answered". (Or "null", which I guess would be not using a dialog tag at all.)

Most notably, we have X "chiming in" immediately after "affirming". You cannot "chime in" when you were the last person to speak! You'd just be chiming in to yourself. (And there's only two of them in this scene anyway, and I guess you can chime in in a two person convo, but would you really need to?)

Edit: Nope, most notably is "Hey" Y greeted. The word "hey" is a greeting. Unless you're using "greeted" here in the odd Scots sense of "wept" there is no need to reiterate that Y is greeting somebody else. And even if you feel there is such a need, it's a transitive verb. You can't just "greet". You have to greet somebody or something.

And it all started out so promisingly too, but I am losing it at this dialog! And there's just so much of it! With adverbs, even!

There is such a thing as too many adverbs.

Comments

[sathari]

What conuly said is exactly what bothered me. Some substitutes for "said"--- the whole "said is dead" thing being more or less the topic of the post--- are ones that, to me, require the author specify to whom they are said. You don't just "greet", you greet a specific [noun]. If you don't want to say to whom your character is speaking, use one of the ones that requires a prepositional phrase in order to be specific. It sounds like you might know a more precise grammatical/linguistic term for the thing that both conuly and I are talking about, and I would love to know it too!

[pauamma]

Elaborating on what I meant by "grammar framing": when the narrative includes the word or words used in greeting (as opposed to telling the reader a character greeted another without specifying what was said/signed/typed), some grammatical descriptions will make the greetee the direct object and the words used a complement of manner ("Alice greeted Bob using/with (some stock phrase)"), and others will make the words used the direct object and the greetee the beneficiary or recipient ("Dave said (another stock greeting phrase) to Carol"). This bears on which can acceptably be left unspecified or eliminated as the direct object is most often the one kept, what semantic role it has regardless. Is that clearer?

[sathari]

Okay, I think I get the grammatical conceit, it's just... rather antithetical to how I think about using words, especially for the purpose of storytelling.