Said Bookism: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|"Are you lost, Daddy?" I asked tenderly.
"Shut up," he explained.
|'''[[Ring Lardner]]''', ''The Young Immigrants''}}
"[[Parrot Exposition|Said Bookism?]]" [[Alice and Bob|Alice]] interrogated. "What's that?"
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"Because," explicated Bob, "it was the fashion at one point. There were even 'said books' you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of ''said'' as saying ''said'' was discredited during that time. That's where the [[Trope Namer|name of the trope]] comes from," he further proclaimed.
"But
Her claim was swiftly dismissed "Not if you want to sell audiobooks!" He proceeded to explain how "Repeated use of dialog tags, including 'said', sounds very repetitive and immersion breaking when spoken aloud repeatedly." Continuing after a brief stop to push his glasses up, he further advised his student "Repeated use of the speaker's name in a conversation between two people is equally redundant and unpleasing to the ear, if not outright insulting to the audience." The bespectacled man summarized his thoughts "Only use of 'said' disguised by synonyms is discredited, dialog bracketed by other actions, and speakers identified by using non-name identifiers remains perfectly valid."
His student nodded to acknowledge his words "That makes sense
"In the worst cases, the dialogue tags end up repeating what the dialogue itself is telling us," Bob stated in addition, [[Shaped Like Itself|revealing that in the worst cases the dialogue tags end up repeating what the dialogue itself is telling us]].
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"Well," declared [[Medium Awareness|Bob]], "[[Self-Demonstrating Article|right here...]]"
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Fanfic]] ==
* ''[[The End Is Near]]'' uses ''a lot'' of these, but it's good enough that the reader can mostly ignore them.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* The trope name comes from the ''[[Turkey City Lexicon]]'', which lists it as a common mistake made by beginning writers.
* The ''[[Tom Swift]]'' books were notorious for this, leading to the invention of the [[Tom Swifty]].
* [[Biggles]] does this all the time. Algy and Ginger might be guilty of saying things, but Biggles and Von Stalhein never are.
* The ''[[Harry Potter]]'' series had a few notorious examples:
{{quote|
"Snape!" Slughorn [[Have a Gay Old Time|ejaculated]]. }}
* "Don't use this trope," ''[[How Not to Write A Novel]]'' [[Hypocritical Humor|advised repeatedly.]]
* ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'' is most definitely guilty of this, as skewered expertly [https://web.archive.org/web/20131110154429/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/dialogue_tags here.]
** ''[[The Host]]'' is just as bad.
** [[Dave Barry]]'s ''Twilight'' parody ''Fangs of Endearment'' does it on every single dialogue tag.
* [[Stephen King]] voiced his disgust for this in ''On Writing'': "Don't do these things. Please oh please. The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said."
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* ''[[The Inheritance Cycle]]'' is infamous for this, especially in ''Eragon''. [[Department of Redundancy Department|"'Sorry,' apologized Brom."]]
* Occasionally, [[Timothy Zahn]]'s otherwise excellent Dragonback Trilogy falls prey to this.
** This actually crops up in pretty much all of his work. The recent ''[[Star Wars/Choices of One|Choices of One]]'' follows the ''Eragon'' example above: [[Department of Redundancy Department|"'Sorry,' Luke apologized."]]
* ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' falls into this sometimes, though this probably has more to do with the fact that the authors replace every instance of the word "said" with "meowed", which can get [[Narm|a little weird sometimes]] and the authors want to avoid that.
* The fantasy author [[Myth Adventures|Robert Lynn Asprin]] is another who sometimes had problems with this.
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* "The word said is to prose what the arrow of a word balloon is to comics", [[Neil Gaiman]] blogged.
* ''[[The Great Gatsby]]'' is not only full of these, it's full of redundant ones, like "snorted contemptuously."
* ''[[Fifty
== [[Web Animation]] ==
* Parodied in the ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' short "[https://web.archive.org/web/20131104135130/http://www.homestarrunner.com/stuckincraw.html The Homestar Runner Gets Something Stuck in His Craw]", which deliberately (over)uses Said Bookism as part of a parody of bad children's books.
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]
[[Category:Show, Don't Tell]]
[[Category:Esoteric Trope Names]]
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