Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3

Unnamed

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 — LessWrong

Comment Permalink

Stylistic note to Eliezer: you frame 98% of your dialogue with "X said" or "said X". This is usually inconspicuous when there is action or reflection to break it up, but in chapters like 47-48 that are full of back-and-forth it can suddenly jump to your notice - and once it does you cannot stop looking at it. More attentive/pedantic readers than myself may well have caught on it earlier.

I would encourage you to mix it up a little with the dozens of options available : blurted, replied, retorted, acknowledged, asked, mused, told [him/her], asserted, stated, questioned, countered, suggested, mumbled, declared, urged, pushed, pointed out, etc.; I've seen some writers overdo this, but a rough 1:1 ratio of "said" to everything else should be fine and make dialogues feel perceivably more alive.

(Not sure if this type of comment is appropriate for the thread, but I'm sure Eliezer reads it as much as he does the FF.net reviews, and I wouldn't want to pass on the chance of being corrected or supported by LW readers)

Showing 3 of 5 replies (Click to show all)

[anonymous]16y00

Disagree. "Said" is punctuation, easily ignored. Anything else will only pull me out of the dialogue.

18Unnamed16y

Reminds me of Tom Swifties. For instance: Harry placed the hat on his head, as he'd done during the sorting ceremony. "You should remember our earlier conversation," Harry reminded the Sorting Hat.

9ArisKatsaris16y

I'll support grautry position too. The content of the dialogue itself should indicate a musing, a question, a counter, an apology, a suggestion, an urging -- using the superfluous words "mused", "asked', "questioned", "countered", "apologized", "suggested", "urged" is very very clumsy. And some of your other suggested words like "stated" instead of "said", and "retorted" instead of "replied" don't even seem to be trying to indicate anything other than the desire to use a synonym. In which case the story is no longer about communicating anything, or depicting a scene, but instead a game of how much of a thesaurus you can use. This is the sort of suggestion that I've seen the fanfiction.net forums actually give out to writers -- new writers actually go there and say "I want more synonyms for the word 'said'"! And the people there instead of saying "No, you don't, you need less synonyms", actually do offer suggestions for more synonyms. It's just horrid horrid advice.

See in context