dialogue tag
English
Noun
dialogue tag (plural dialogue tags)
- Used other than with a figurative or idiomatic meaning: see dialogue, tag.
- (authorship) A sentence part that attributes a piece of written dialogue to its speaker. (e.g. In "Get out of here," he said, "he said" is a dialogue tag.)
- Not every paragraph of dialogue needs to have a dialogue tag attached to it.
- 2000, Tom Romano, Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers, →ISBN, page 63:
- Sometimes inexperienced writers will discover the useful tool of tacking on detail to a dialog tag with a present participal or adverbial phrase: "It's too late," she said, closing the door.
- 2004, Leslie Wainger, Writing a Romance Novel For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons:
- A dialogue tag has to indicate sound
- 2011, Deborah Halverson, Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons:
- An alternative style forsakes italics altogether and assigns a dialogue tag: This is going nowhere, he thought.
- 2015, Kris James; Laura E. Koons, Stefanie Spangler Buswell, Beyond the Style Manual: Bundle #1, Red Adept Publishing:
- A line of dialogue followed by a dialogue tag looks like this: “Nothing suits me better than a fried egg on toast early in the morning,” Billy said.
Synonyms
- speech tag
- tag
- tag line
See also
- said-bookism
- Tom Swifty
References
