Words other than Said

Lawrh,

Cool list.

However, I will warn the novice writers out there to not be too concerned about using "said" a lot.

The usual reason for not wanting to use "said" over and over again is the fear of being boring to the reader. Fortunately for all writers everywhere, this isn't really the case.

Read any piece of quality writing (e.g. Wall Street Journal article, Hemingway book). Then go back through it and count how many times it uses "said." The point here is not to compare the number with a piece of non-quality writing, but to realize that when you first read the piece, it didn't occur to you that the author used "said" a lot.

In fact, look over this post and see how many times I used "the". Quite a lot. But was it really distracting?

What can be more distracting is when an author tries to spice up poor writing with other words for said.

"The dog is brown," she retorted.
"I disagree," Mr. Blue proclaimed.
"Well, you're wrong," she shot back.

Now, all that being said, the above example is an extreme. A selective use of the list may add some quality to a piece with lots of dialogue.

Not to shoot you down on your post!