'On the Untimeliness of Speech Tags,'

he sobbed, pitifully.

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There’s more that’s worth saying on speech tags.

Here’s something we perhaps don’t often notice about them, even though it’s completely obvious:

Speech tags come after the dialogue they are describing, and so any effect they have can only be retrospective.

In other words, if you read —

‘I have an intense dislike of you, and want you completely out of my life,’ he said flirtatiously.

it’s only when you get to the very end of the sentence that you understand what’s going on in that bit of dialogue, that moment in the scene.

How much more mischievous if it were —

‘I have an intense dislike of you,’ he said flirtatiously, ‘and want you completely out of my life.’

We’re at least in on half of the joke here.

This first example might be extreme, and comic, but the same goes for —

‘Get out of the car,’ he said in a whiny voice.

An order suddenly becomes a plea.

All of this, you might think, is moot. We’re reading so fast that it doesn’t really matter that a speech tag is exactly that — an additional bit of information about the speaker’s tone that we factor in a moment after we’ve taken in the gist of what they’ve just said.

I find this quirk of English grammar very unsatisfactory.

If I know it’s important for the reader to be aware of how something is said — the pace or pitch — I will try to insert it before the quoted speech.

The next thing he said came out in a voice much higher than usual. ‘Get out of the car.’

You might think this pushes too hard, but it — or something like it — is the only way to get the page to speak as you want. Frontload the info.

Imagine if you were watching a play, and the actress, deadpan, delivered the line —

I never loved you.

and then turned to the audience and said —

Oh, by the way, I screamed that.

This is something like the belated effect of crucial, transformative speech tags. At least as I read them.

Better, in written dialogue, would be —

She screamed at her, ‘I never loved you!’

Note: I think if you leave the exclamation mark off, it becomes very hard to imagine the tone of delivery.

There’s a comparable effect when characters ask questions, and the author leaves off the question mark. I love this, well used, but it can seem affected.

‘Is it such a very long way,’ he asked.

To me, this suggests affectlessness or aggressively faked unconcern. How blandly, in comparison, this vanilla version reads —

‘Is it such a very long way?’ he asked.

A more subtle way to imply affectlessness is to use said instead of asked.

‘Is it such a very long way?’ he said.

But this is something extremely nuanced. And if you’re obeying Elmore Leonard and using said for all dialogue, it isn’t an effect available to you. Because there’s no variation. Some level of affectlessness runs throughout. Everyone just says everything.

However, I think where this all becomes really interesting — and even less frequently considered — is when we get to punctuations marks.

I have seriously considered adopting the Spanish inverted question mark, because it goes at the start of the sentence, and we know from that moment on what is being said is a question —

‘¿You’re hungry?’ he said.

This would work even better in longer sentences.

‘¿So you were planning on going into town and meeting all our friends and having a party and when exactly were you going to tell me?’

Similarly, the Spanish exclamation mark does a timely job.

‘¡You are so stupid!’ she shouted.

The doubling up feels a little overkill. But therefore very Spanish. I see maracas held high and low. Especially with double inverted commas —

“¡You are so stupid!” she shouted.

or comillas —

«¡You are so stupid!» she shouted.

And isn’t this — leaving off the final question mark — deliciously icy?

‘¿So you were planning to going into town and meeting all our friends and having a party and when exactly were you going to tell me.’

Do you have good examples of writers using any of these nuances?