Dialogue Tag
The attribution phrase that identifies who is speaking, such as "she said" or "he asked."
Last updatedA dialogue tag is the phrase that attributes a line of speech to a character, most commonly "said" and "asked." Dialogue tags serve a purely functional purpose: they tell the reader who is talking. The best tags are invisible, allowing the dialogue itself to carry the scene's weight. "Said" is invisible because readers process it without conscious attention, like punctuation.
Elmore Leonard, one of fiction's great dialogue writers, famously advised using nothing but "said" for attribution. His novels demonstrate the principle: the characters' words and actions convey tone without the tag needing to do that work. Cormac McCarthy goes further in novels like No Country for Old Men, often omitting tags entirely when context makes the speaker clear.
Tags become problematic when they try to do too much. Adverb-heavy tags like "she said angrily" are considered weak because they tell rather than show the emotion. Action beats ("She slammed her glass down. 'I'm done.'") are often stronger alternatives. The goal is clarity about who is speaking with minimum interruption to the reading experience.