Okay, y'all, here we go again. I've decided to take one of my Please Don'ts from the annals of bad fiction writing (lots of it my own in my teenage years; ugh).
Please don't use weird dialogue tags/use actions as dialogue tags.
Okay, let's get something straight.
"Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!" Shelby greeted.
^^DO NOT DO THIS THING.
I can say:
Shelby greeted her readers: "Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!"
or
"Hello! Welcome to the Please Don'ts!"
But please don't try to make dialogue tags out of action words.
*sidenote: Did I use the word "greeted" because besides being an action verb and therefore not a very good dialogue tag it is also impossible to use as a dialogue tag because it requires an object and therefore cannot be used in any other way besides "Shelby greeted [person]"? ...Possibly.
**second sidenote: I'm side-eyeing you people using this as a dialogue tag so hard every time I read it. Including in actual published stuff. So much side-eyeing.
Let me introduce you to my much-maligned friend, "Said."
Said would like you to remember that it is, in fact, a totally acceptable dialogue tag. For example:
"I was thinking about doing a Please Don't for my blog piece," Shelby began.
"Which of your pet peeves were you thinking of doing?" Matt questioned.
"I wanted to talk about dialogue," Shelby stated.
"Dialogue has a lot of rules," Matt sighed.
"Yeah, I wasn't going to talk about comma usage in dialogue or what order to put the speaker and dialogue tag in," Shelby groaned.
"That sounds like it would be a lot of work," Matt observed.
"Yes, but coming up with trite dialogue for a really long example is even harder," Shelby pointed out.
"How so?" Matt asked.
"I'm trying to keep the dialogue going as long as possible so people can begin to get distracted by the dialogue tags," Shelby explained.
"Do you think that will work?" Matt whispered.
"I don't know, but it's worth a try," Shelby replied.
"Are you running out of dialogue tags to think of?" Matt responded.
"Oh, no," Shelby chuckled. "If I were to bring in other things, like dialogue tags as action words, which I just told them not to do, I could go on forever."
"Do you really think they could handle it?" Matt exclaimed.
"Watch. They might not even realized that I threw a couple in before I even started telling you I was going to," Shelby laughed.
"Well, some of them are very subtle," Matt nodded.
"Do you think we should stop now?" Shelby pondered.
"I think they get the point, yeah," Matt grinned.
"Okay. I'll go back to talking to the readers," Shelby proclaimed.
.....
You back with me? You're still here?
Phew. That was a fun read, wasn't it? Did you get distracted by some of the tags? Did you notice that some worked better than others? Did you notice that I just wrote an entire piece without using the word "said"? Did you notice that it started to get sort of repetitive and that you didn't realize the action was happening with the dialogue because it was all jumbled in there?
Good. You're learning.
Now let's try a different approach.
.....
"I'm back," Shelby said with a grin.
"Oh, good. Do I get to be part of the story again?" Matt asked.
"Of course you do. You're the only other person in this house." Shelby laughed and shook her head.
Matt smiled. "Okay, fine. But we should talk about something different."
"Okay," Shelby said. "What would you like to talk about?"
Matt shrugged. "Anything. How did your day go today?"
"It was pretty good. I worked a lot and wrote a blog piece about dialogue," Shelby said.
Matt sighed. "See, there you go again."
"What?"
"Talking about your blog piece!"
"Oh." Shelby frowned. "I guess it's hard not to do that when I'm still actually writing the thing."
"Maybe I'll tell you about my day?"
"Yeah," Shelby said. "Yeah, that sounds good."
....
Hello again! Okay, so do you see what I'm saying? Action words like "laughed" and "smiled" and "frowned" are set off in their own sentence, not as part of the dialogue tags. What's more, I used "said" a lot more because it doesn't distract from what's actually being said in the dialogue itself. I can use "said" as a placeholder to pause in the dialogue such as in this sentence:
"Okay," Shelby said. "What would you like to talk about?"
See how that works?
Not to mention the fact that some dialogue doesn't even need a tag. Use them sparingly, use "said" lots more, and stop trying to "spice it up" with weird. Nine times out of ten, it's just annoying.
Now go to, my pretties, and reacquaint yourself with my friend "Said." He needs a home, and he'd love to stay with you if you'll just give him a place to stay!
Okay. Let me sit y'all down for just a bit.
Comfy? Okay. Good. Because I've got to level with you: you need to stop.
Yes, I'm talking to you, person who insists that "your" and "you're" are the same thing. And you, person who thinks commas are for crazy people. It's time you learned about the English language.
I'll probably make this an ongoing series, with various Please Don'ts added in for writing, editing, whatever else. I was going to make this a "Top Five" list, but I realized it's really hard to pick just five. And to make them not the usual "it's versus its" argument.
So, in no particular order, here are my Please Don'ts for the week.
1. Please don't ever, ever say "The reason is because."
Please. Never. Never ever.
Why? I'm glad you asked.
"The reason is" literally means "because." Literally. (Not the "literally" when used to mean figuratively, mind you, although that somehow made it into the dictionary.)
So when you say "the reason is because," you are actually saying "because because" and unless you are singing along to "The Wizard of Oz," there is pretty much no valid reason for that.
"But Shelby!" I can hear you saying. "I say that all the time!"
Yes, well, saying things out loud and writing them down are different. When we speak with our mouths, we are speaking off the cuff, as it comes to us. We break all sorts of rules when we talk, but that's because we're still thinking about it, and our listeners can usually pick up on things like hand gestures and expressions to fill in the gaps. When we speak with our pens/pencils/laptops/other writing devices, we have time to think through it and to read through it.
*note: Reading through does not mean using spell-checker to automatically do this for you. I'm looking at you, pre-teen me.
2. Please don't ever try to make something plural by added apostrophe-s.
I don't know who started this trend, but I would like them to stop. Seriously, in what universe does making something possessive make it plural?
Okay, so let's sit down and do the middle school thing.
My friend's jelly beans = The jelly beans that belong to my friend
My friend's a jelly bean = My friend is a jelly bean.
My friends love jelly beans = I have multiple friends, and they all love jelly beans.
My friends' jelly beans = The jelly beans that belong to the multiple friends I just mentioned.
Oh man, I should have picked other examples. Now I want jelly beans. And friends.
I understand that with things like "the 1980's" there can be an apostrophe (though I prefer "the 1980s" myself) depending on what style guide and rulebook you prefer but for crying out loud that is the exception and please stop pretending that's an excuse to run amok throwing apostrophes around willy-nilly!
3. Please don't use "where" when you mean "were" (or vice versa).
I understand. They are very similar, except one has an "h" and the other does not.
Here, let me explain.
"Where" = place
"Were" = the past tense of the verb "to be"
The jelly beans were where we left them.
The jelly beans at a previous point in time happened to be at the place that we left them.
Yep, I still want jelly beans.
4. Please don't write sentences that try to hide your verbs.
This one's a little trickier to explain. I'll try to do it by example.
Okay, so let's say I want to tell you that I ate the last of the jelly beans.
"The eating of the jelly beans, which previously had been in a full container, had the result that no other person got to eat any jelly beans besides myself."
That was a really awful sentence, y'all. I cried a little bit writing it.
First of all, let's look at the actual verbs, okay?
"The eating of the jelly beans, which previously had been in a full container, had the result that no other person got to eat any jelly beans besides myself."
Oh my gosh, I hate this so much.
Do you see what's happening here? I've hidden all the blame and all the action in so much garble-dee-gook that it's very hard to tell that I'm the one who ate all the jelly beans.
*note: This is why legal jargon follows this pattern. Stuff gets hidden in bills all the time because why would we just speak plain English?
Now let's use more exciting verbs!
"I ate the entire container of jelly beans myself, so no one else can have any."
Look at that! CLARITY. *cue the Hallelujah chorus
Please, please, please do this when you write. There is nothing more obnoxious to me than reading a piece that tries to hide its verbs.
5. Please don't noun verbs.
*Please read Calvin and Hobbes. You will be enlightened on the joys of "verbing weirds language."
This is another one that's best illustrated by example, and it sort of ties into the previous point. Remember that awful sentence?
"The eating of the jelly beans, which previously had been in a full container, had the result that no other person got to eat any jelly beans besides myself."
Oh my gosh, why.
Anyway, "the eating of the jelly beans" is the most awkward construction of all time, but I did it on purpose because I see you do this all the time, political science major self.
I don't know why we like to do this with our language, but for some reason, we are absolutely convinced that we sound more distinguished or smart or whatever if we take all our action verbs and make them into boring nouns.
Spoiler alert: it just makes you sound like a badly-written lawyer in an over-hyped legal drama.
"The eating of the jelly beans was done by myself"
Oh gosh I made it worse.
Please stop doing this. Please just write, in plain English, "I ate the jelly beans."
"But Shelby!" I can hear you saying. "I need to vary my sentence structure!"
That's fine. Let me show you how to do that in a not-stupid way.
First, the wrong way:
I saw the jelly beans. They were in a jar. The jar was full. I pulled the jar off the shelf. I ate everything in the jar. I put the jar back on the shelf. It was empty. I was sorry for eating all the jelly beans. I told my roommates I ate all the jelly beans. They were mad at me.
See how boring that is? Subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb.....
"But Shelby!" you're saying right now; I can just feel it. "Doesn't that prove the point?"
NO. No, it does not!
The right way:
I looked up and saw the jelly beans, sitting in a jar on the shelf. It looked like most of the jelly beans were still there; it was almost full. So, I pulled the jar off the shelf, and I proceeded to eat everything in the jar. When I put the jar back on the shelf, it was empty.
Almost immediately, I felt sorry for eating all the jelly beans, and when my roommates arrived, I told them what I'd done. They were, justifiably, mad at me.
Look at that variation of sentence structure! Look at those action verbs! Look at the ebb and flow of the story!
Feel the hunger for jelly beans! (No, that's just me? Okay.)
My point is, you can vary your sentences and have your story ebb and flow without noun-ing your verbs. So please stop. The rest of us will thank you for our sudden ability to understand what the heck is happening in your sentences.
Well, thus ends my Please Don'ts . . . for now. Please do go out and stop doing all these things, and come back next time when hopefully I will be less hungry while I'm writing my blog posts . . . .
