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grautry comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 - Less Wrong
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Well then, I'd be happy to correct you.
It's fairly common writing advice that you should do your best not to use any other verb than 'said' to carry on a conversation.
To put it simply, most people simply ignore the repetitive nature of 'he said', 'she said'. Therefore, conversation flows fairly smoothly and naturally. Constantly injecting synonyms for 'he said', 'she said' is a sign of a new writer.
Naturally this doesn't mean "never ever use anything else besides 'said' to mark the dialogue". However, the alternatives should be used only in places where they fit exceptionally well and not just for variety's sake.
Disclaimer: This should not be taken as a definitive opinion on the subject since there are writers out there who will agree with you. I'd say, however, that the consensus is on the side of "use said as much as possible".
I agree with the first, but not the last. There is also the option of dropping "he verbed" entirely.
This can cause problems. Sometimes when I read a lengthy dialogue in this style, I read a line which seems to me much less likely to by said by character whose turn it is to speak, and I have to go back to the last anchor point where it was made explicit who was talking, and carefully keep track of it. In some cases, after doing this, I have wondered if the author lost track.
Being clearly understood is more important that avoiding the appearance of redundancy.
In some case, I have confirmed that the author must have lost track, and have had to make a guess as to where the mistake is.
I confirm that Grautry's answer is the conventional one, and that I often worry that I am overusing adverbs or verbs that are not simply "said", which is what we are told to worry about.
Yeah, after seeing this responses I did a bit of looking around and I acknowledge that it is apparently quite frowned upon, at least in English prose (to the point of having a name: "said-bookisms").
No matter how many compared examples I read, after trying hard to "blank" my mind beforehand, I still find myself liking the "exorted/rebuffed/pressed/" version over the "said/said/said" more, so I'm probably just a statistical anomaly.
Another way to check would be to see whether there are well-loved stories which engage in said-bookism.
The idea that authors ought eschew synonyms for "said" might merely be a theory which works fairly well, but doesn't reliably cover the range of what people like in their fiction.
That comment was based on CS Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism-- the argument is that any fiction which attracts devoted rereading has something going for it, and it's better to evaluate fiction by the sort of reading it gets rather than evaluating readers by whether they like the right fiction.
This was published in 1961-- I think the idea of dethroning official lists of Great Books was more revolutionary then.
See also his High and Low Brows, which argues that the only reliable difference between high and low status art is that high status art is more difficult to appreciate, with the clinching argument being the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart becoming high status as they become less accessible.
He further argues that both high and low status art have good and bad features and should be evaluated by the same standards.