However, if clarity of speech were relevant to a scene, you could use this word as a tag as it would fit. However, if you were to use this tag randomly in the middle of dialogue it would seem arbitrary.īecause ‘to enunciate’ means ‘to say or pronounce clearly’ it doesn’t completely make sense in this context, since there isn’t a clear reason for the boy to ‘enunciate’.
Yet it suggests words such as ‘enunciated’ as a synonym for ‘said’. The infographic below ( via The Puppet Show) has some good alternatives. Ideally, your reader is getting as much clarity from what characters say as they get from how they say it. The stranger the tag, the more colourful and quirky, the more it will stick out in your dialogue. If you’re unsure about your use of dialogue tags, our novel editing services will help you make dialogue read naturally. The girls’ actions make it clear she’s the addressee of ‘You seem distracted.’ Her response also gives us a sense of how her date says this. It’s clear from the narration, description and actions who is saying what in the scene. She picked a bit of fluff off her top, looked out the window. The narration beforehand makes it clear who’s speaking, and the details of the characters’ speech give away who says what: If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these, you don’t need tags.įor example, you wouldn’t need to use dialogue tags in the following example. Do preceding narration and formatting (such as line breaks) help clarify who is speaking?.Is it clear, from context, who is speaking at this moment?.When you get to the end of a line of dialogue, ask yourself: Just because it’s a writing device commonly used in dialogue doesn’t mean you have to use it. Sometimes we say ‘she said’, ‘he said’ or ‘they said’ when we don’t need to. Here are 5 simple ways to avoid clunky overuse of ‘he said/she said’: 1. While some synonyms for ‘said’ read naturally (such as words conveying volume like ‘whispered’), others come across as overwritten and forced, particularly in the wrong context. If you search for alternative dialogue tags to use in your story, you’ll find many lists.