You’ve used them many times, but perhaps you didn’t know it had a name—or names. Whether you call them attributions, dialogue tags, or speech tags, you need to know how and when to use them. 

Dialogue attribution means writing “XXX said” after the dialogue, at the end of dialogue, or in-between dialogue by the same speaker. They clarify who is speaking, thus guarding against the reader’s confusion. If a conversation goes on too long without a tag, the reader will lose track of who is saying what.

But what if we don’t want to use the monotonous “said” tag over and over again?

We can use “beats” (short descriptions of thought or action) OR structure our dialogue so the reader gets a clue as to is speaking from the text or from the order of speech.

Use tags only when they are needed to clarify who is talking, or as a clever way to add action, facial expression, or reveal something new about your character. They are good ways to break up long sections of dialogue, but using them too often can be distracting for readers. 

A writer can put tags at the beginning, middle, or end of dialogue. My best advice is to use a varied approach.

Using tags such as “Mary said,” or “Mary remarked,” at the beginning of dialogue often takes the reader’s attention away from the dialogue. For variety, use it at the beginning if it is descriptive: Mary looked upward, shielding her eyes from the sun. “It’s only seven o’clock in the morning and I’m already sweating.”

Putting a tag at the end, puts the reader’s focus on the dialogue itself: “It’s only seven o’clock in the morning and I’m already sweating,” Mary said, looking upward and shielding her eyes from the sun.

Finally, using tags in the middle of a character’s dialogue is a good way to break up long lines of dialogue or introduce a natural pause in speech: “It’s only seven o’clock in the morning,” said Mary, shielding her eyes from the sun. “I’m already sweating.”

This last method of tagging is quickly becoming a favorite of mine, but let’s not forget another easily used method of having the “other” person in the conversation using the other’s name: “Mary, you look lovely.” Or, descriptively, you could write: He touched Mary’s arm. “You look lovely.” In both cases speaker one has tagged Mary as the other person in the conversation.

Finally, be sure to put your dialogue inside quotation marks. I recently read a story which failed to use both quotation marks and attributions. As you might expect, I had to put the book down after reading only a couple of pages. The experience left me questioning why we are allowing self-publishing carte blanche…

But that’s another subject for another time…