We need tag verbs that vocalize the dialogue, not describe it. We might occasionally use “whispered” or “shouted,” but most of the time we need “said.”
Cheryl St. John says, “We don’t want the reader to stop and look at the tag. We want them to hear the dialogue. Said is always the best choice. Said is like a ketchup stain on rose-patterned wallpaper: It’s there, but nobody’s paying any attention to it. That’s how we want our dialogue tags to blend in.”
We may never find out why some bestselling authors haven’t heeded that message, but that’s no excuse for us to follow their bad examples. Verbs like laughed, repeated, inserted, continued, exclaimed, smiled . . . are almost always obvious, redundant, unrealistic, or unnecessary.
Ideally, our descriptions of tone of voice, actions, and body language will identify the speaker (called beats), which eliminates the need for so many tags.
This is another good example of how to write dialogue.