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Interesting discussion @audrey-the-author .. I’ve also noticed this divide…

I think I side more with the camp which believes ‘said’ to be very much alive.

That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate a more descriptive dialogue tag at times and if the situation calls for it, but in general I prefer to stick with ‘said’ when I’m writing dialogue.

I find that using the ‘said’ tag helps to focus the reader’s attention on the dialogue, because a lot of the time we tend to skip over ‘said’.

Also (and this is very much just a personal preference), too much variety of dialogue tags frustrates me. It can sometimes feel like an author has just looked up ‘said’ in a thesaurus and is throwing in synonyms without consideration for the context of the dialogue.

In an interesting twist though, I often most like the dialogue that I write without any tags, using actions instead to identify the speaker.

I’m interested to hear where everyone else stands because like you point out it seems as though there’s a real mix of opinions on this topic!