User blog comment:Thebiggesttdifan/The Critic Raves-Summer Schedule Judging, Week 1/@comment-1443671-20120722155727/@comment-1874924-20120722193858

It's very much a matter of individual taste, and there's no real consensus. Some writers avoid "said" at all costs, whereas others take the equally extreme position that you should never use anything but "said". The usual complaint against alternative dialogue tags is that they're redundant, but one man's redundancy is another man's emphasis.

Like any stylistic element, alternative dialogue tags can be handled gracefully and they can be handled clumsily. To give an example of it (presumably) being done reasonably well, how many of Legacy's readers noticed how rarely the word "said" appears?

Clumsy use of alternative dialogue tags (like its parent affliction, thesaurusitis) usually stems from failure to properly understand shades of meaning. A writer who knows what he's doing can use a wide variety of dialogue tags and make it all sound perfectly natural. If a dialogue tag is actually distracting, which is TBTDIF's complaint here, that's a sign that the tag is either too flowery or (more commonly) has the wrong shade of meaning.

That said, each of the three stories reviewed here do in fact have problems with their dialogue tags:

Personally, I thought that the prologue to The Island did a decent job with its tags, despite the complete absence of the word "said", and doesn't have all that much dialogue in the first place. I saw only three tags that seemed out of place: "responded" in place of "replied" is not a good dialogue tag, and really belongs in narrative description; "gasped" works better when the speaker is injured or winded and is fighting to get the words out; and "planned" isn't a legitimate dialogue tag at all.

LOST on Wawanakwa (LOW) relies mainly on "said" as the dialogue tag, even when it's not the best choice (such as when the speaker asks a question), but some of the exceptions are sketchy. For example "uttered" rarely if ever works well as a dialogue tag, and really belongs in narrative description. (That's the case with many problematic dialogue tags.) Likewise, "fought" is not a legitimate dialogue tag.

As for the alternative tags that TBTDIF dismissed as bad, I agree that "queried" is rarely if ever better than "inquired", and I've already discussed "responded". "Retorted" appears twice, used properly once (during an argument) and misused once (where it doesn't fit the situation). As for "suggested", I use that with some regularity myself. As a dialogue tag, "suggested" appears five times in Legacy (compared to once in LOW) and an average of twice per chapter in LTDI.

Where I really have to disagree with TBTDIF regarding LOW, though, is his claim that the words tacked onto "said" don't improve our understanding of the situation. That might be the case with more sophisticated dialogue; but with LOW's dialogue consisting mainly of short, declarative sentences, those "said" modifiers are often helpful or even necessary to understand the speaker's state of mind. The problem is not that some of these modifiers are redundant, but that they simply don't fit the situation. An example is the exchange,


 * “Okay, what was that?” asked Gwen.
 * “How would we know?” said Courtney astutely.

There is nothing "astute" about Courtney's question.

Total Drama Honolulu is full of strange dialogue tags that are really narrative actions: "smiled", "frowned", and so on. The real problem here, though, is not avoidance of "said" (which does, in fact, appear frequently) but rather incorrect punctuation. For example, the sentence


 * Amber frowned, "Aw... But I was doing so good !"

should have a period, instead of a comma, after "frowned". The period would turn this passage into a short narrative sentence followed by a line of dialogue that has no tag at all (and may not need one). Misuse of the comma, however, turns "frowned" into a dialogue tag--a role for which it is poorly suited, to put it mildly.