Comments on: Said Harry Potter – Harry Potter Said

By: Snug

Snug — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 23:37:11 +0000

Hello, new here. I was wondering if age and category of book, such as chapterbooks, middlegrade books, young adult novels and farther on up, are taken into consideration when regarding dialogue tags? A lot of my favorite kids books use all the above mentioned tags to wildly varying degrees; said Harry, Harry said, Harry said angrily, said Harry angrily, and the sentence leading into the dialogue so that no tag is needed, Am I forgetting any? None of these seem out of the ordinary and to me, rather, they appear quite comfortable on the eye. For younger readers such as the age groups for the above mentioned categories, are these tags perfectly fine? And, where it’s considered unneeded, unnecessary or just wrong, are you speaking from a place of adult novels?

Thank you!
Daniel

By: Quinton J Short

Quinton J Short — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 15:40:54 +0000

I think with the Harry Potter books we have to remember that the target audience is 10 year old kids who might be more easily confused than adults who happen to be avid readers and writers. Sorry about the adverb.

By: Brad Graber

Brad Graber — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 17:54:05 +0000

In reply to Steve Youngs. I had to laugh when I saw your reply. I'm with you!

By: kathryn

kathryn — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 20:28:45 +0000

I prefer the old European (Spanish, for example) way.
A long dash (tiret) introduces the spoken line.
Often no specification of who spoke is given. You can understand from the context.
If the tags are given in other languages, they are often more dramatic than in English.
In English, many have been taught to stick to rather neutral tags using say/utter/ tell.
I innovated in my new manuscript to avoid the usual tags. Not easy. I also reduced dialogue to avoid too many tags. Maybe it will work?