Read the last conversation you wrote and count how many adverbs sit next to the word said. If there is more than one, you have found the first thing an editor will circle. Dialogue tags are the plumbing of fiction: necessary, unglamorous, and at their best when nobody notices them. When they leak, readers lose track of who is speaking and how they feel, and a scene that ought to crackle starts to sag. The same five faults turn up again and again in submissions, and each one has a fix you can apply in an afternoon.
Mistake One: The Adverb Crutch
"Get out," he said angrily. The adverb is doing work the dialogue should be doing. If the words are already angry, angrily is a nervous tic; if they are not, no adverb will rescue them.
This is not a ban on adverbs. They earn their place when they cut against the line. "I'm fine," she said brightly, when both characters know she is not, creates friction rather than restating the obvious.
Try the subtraction test. Delete every adverb attached to a tag, then read the scene again. Most cuts will go unnoticed. For the few that leave a gap, fix the dialogue or add a beat instead. Get out. He did not raise his voice, which was worse. No adverb needed.
Mistake Two: Said-Bookisms
A said-bookism is any tag chosen to prove the writer owns a thesaurus: he opined, she intoned, he quipped, she retorted. The temptation is understandable. Said feels plain, and a scene can look repetitive on the page. In practice, said is invisible. Readers skim past it, which is exactly what you want from plumbing.
Worse are tags that describe something a person cannot do with words. You cannot smile a sentence, laugh a sentence or shrug one. Those are actions, and they belong in beats.
- Speech verbs: said, asked, replied, answered, whispered, shouted, muttered.
- Sounds and gestures, not speech: laughed, chuckled, sighed, snorted, grinned, smiled.
- Showy alternatives: opined, intoned, quipped, ejaculated, retorted.
Keep to said and asked for the great majority of your tags. Hissed, whispered and mumbled can stay where volume genuinely matters.
Mistake Three: Action Beats That Confuse the Reader
An action beat is a small piece of business attached to a line of dialogue. It replaces a tag, breaks up a run of speech, and shows us a body in a room. It also causes more punctuation errors than anything else in fiction.
- "I'm not hungry," she said, pushing the plate away. Correct: the tag and the participial beat share one sentence.
- "I'm not hungry," she pushed the plate away. Wrong: a comma cannot join dialogue to a standalone action.
- "I'm not hungry." She pushed the plate away, then picked up her fork. Correct, and the reversal tells us something.
The other failure is attribution. A beat dropped between two speakers can attach itself to the wrong mouth, and three or four untagged lines in a row leave the reader scrolling back to work out who is talking. Keep each beat next to the line it belongs to, and prefer beats that reveal the speaker while complicating what they have just said.
Mistake Four: Tagging Every Single Line
Once a reader knows two people are talking, alternating lines need no tags at all. Tagging each one produces a thudding rhythm — he said, she said, he said — that flattens the exchange.
The opposite fault is just as common: four characters in a kitchen, no tags for half a page, and a reader counting on their fingers. Use a tag in these situations:
- The first line of a scene, or the first line after a break in time or place.
- Whenever the speaker changes and more than one line has passed.
- When an action beat could plausibly belong to either character.
- In any scene with three or more people, where you need to re-anchor regularly.
Then trust the voices. Distinct vocabulary, rhythm and preoccupations do more for clarity than any tag.
Mistake Five: Beats That Repeat the Dialogue
"I'm leaving," she said, walking out of the door. The beat has become a subtitle for the line we have just read. The same goes for shouted loudly, whispered quietly, and nodded his head in agreement. Wordings like these take up space without adding information.
A good beat does one of three jobs: it contradicts the words, complicates them, or reveals something the speaker would rather not say. I'm leaving. She stayed where she was, one hand on the kettle. Now the reader has a question, and the scene has forward motion.
Revision Exercises
Take one page of dialogue from a draft and work through these in order. None should take more than ten minutes.
- Adverb audit. Highlight every adverb attached to a tag. Delete them all, then restore no more than one, and only if it contradicts the line.
- Said-only pass. Rewrite the page using nothing but said and asked. Notice how much faster it reads.
- Beat swap. Replace every remaining tag with an action beat, then cut half of those. Three or four beats per page is usually plenty.
- Read it aloud. No narration, just the dialogue. If you lose track of who is speaking, your reader will too.
- Blind test. Cover the tags and read only the spoken lines. If you cannot tell the characters apart, revise how they speak rather than adding more tags.
- Physical check. Ask of each beat: could a person actually do this while saying that? If not, move it or cut it.
A Final Pass
Before you send a chapter anywhere, read one page of dialogue with a pencil in hand and go through the faults in sequence: cut the adverbs, keep the tags plain, check that every beat belongs to the right speaker and survives the physical test. Then read the page aloud once more. The aim is not invisible writing for its own sake, but dialogue so clean that the reader hears voices rather than machinery.
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