“I told you I’m handling it, so back off.” In the next excerpt, the action beat is the complete sentence that precedes the dialogue and ends with a period.ĭempsey’s nostrils flared. Second, depending on the tag selected, they can provide descriptive insight to the character’s emotional state when delivering his or her line.Įxamples of common dialogue tags include: said, replied, asked, shouted, screamed, answered, whispered and cried.Ī beat is an action performed by the speaker, immediately before, during, or after speaking. First and foremost, they remove ambiguity about who is speaking. In a conversation between two or more speakers, dialogue tags often do double duty. “I told you I’m handling it, so back off,” Dempsey shouted. In the following example, the dialogue tag occurs at the end of the sentence after the comma and closing quotation marks. Before we dive in, let’s start by defining these two unsung heroes of dialogue.Ī dialogue tag is an element that “tags” the dialogue to a particular speaker. Yes, what your characters say matters immensely, but the savvy author knows that how they say it matters too and that’s the topic of this post.
If you think dialogue is something that only happens “inside the quotation marks,” then think again.
#Good dialogue tags how to#
How to Use “Tags” and “Beats” to Elevate Your Dialogue.
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