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  • F.C. Tait replied to the topic Historical Short Story in the forum Critiques 8 years, 1 month ago

    @scarletimmortalized The current writing advice (which is constantly changing but I actually agree with this time) is to use “invisible” dialogue tags. Readers won’t read “asked, asked, asked”, or the same with “said”. Instead, they take in who’s talking and skip over the verb without really registering it, if that makes sense. You’ll probably find you do that with books, just not with your own writing (because to writers it can seem really repetitive).

    So you might use a different tag such as “whispered” or “snapped” when it actually has a different meaning to “said” and “asked”, but “queried” has the same meaning as “asked”. So basically the reader’s attention is drawn to that word because it isn’t an invisible one, but there’s no need for that attention because the question mark has already indicated it’s a question, so “said” or “asked” reads more naturally.

    Hopefully that makes sense. Having said all that, it’s just the current advice. You’re not over-using those kind of tags (there’s nothing more wearying than a whole page of “queried”, “inquired”, “wondered”, etc.), so one use should be fine if you want to keep it.

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