Looking up articles on dialogue tags (the “x said” and attached actions following a piece of dialogue) I have noticed two things. First, most focus on the relatively unimportant issue of he said/she said, and whether to use synomyms or not. The second is that very few even mention that tags can be used before the dialogue, and pretty much nobody mentions how the placement affects the meaning and effect of the sentence. In fact, as far as I know, I may be the only one who has noticed that (probably not, of course.)
Continue reading “The forgotten elegance of forward dialogue tags”Month: May 2019
Expert use of -ing participles
I didn’t want to write this post because I feared the wrong conclusions or lessons could be drawn from it. It is a bit like writing a piece about how the common understanding of drugs and addictions is wrong or exagerated, how most people can take large amounts of drugs without becoming addicted, that the withdrawal effects of some drugs (like heroin) are actually pretty mild, that the “addiction” that people suffer is notlike a demon that takes posession of you, and so on. It’s all technically true, sure, but, you know, some people may get the wrong idea.
To fill new readers in, the point of this post (and the previous one it alludes to) are the participial phrases used in writing, usually with verbal forms ending in -ing although occasionally -ed too (i.e. present and past participles, respectively) which have spread like a linguistic plague of locust across the literary landscape. In that post, I said:
Emperor's Notepad 