The Things We Hate

Every reader, every writer, and every editor has a focused loathing for some grammatical construction, syntactical convention, peculiar spelling choice, stylistic conceit, or punctuation usage. It takes on the aspect of a holy crusade. These peeves become so deeply ingrained with time (and repeated annoyance) that they are eventually assimilated into the flesh and marrow of who we are as language enthusiasts. It’s funny, because logically these perceived transgressions do us no harm. Why not skim over them? Why not accept a particular wordsmith’s decision as a charming quirk, or at least an inoffensive deviation? We all have the right to be odd, after all.

Of course we aren’t going to do that! We get so boiling mad when we see someone violate a personally cherished rule that we can scarcely contain ourselves. Whether it’s the deployment (or omission) of the Oxford comma, the overuse of the passive voice, an excessive reliance on literary clichés, pretentious word choices, the jarring insertion of slang and dialect, or the utilization of “not un-” instead of the corresponding antonymic adjective, these things send us into a righteous philological rage. Some despise parentheses. Some scorn one-sentence paragraphs. Some shriek when confronted with a sentence fragment. There are those who consider the very presence of an adverb discordant, like a fart during a symphonic performance. I have a friend who fought with her editor over the matter of whether to put foreign-language text in italics. One author memorably explained in her preface why she preferred to use “bluegreen” as opposed to “blue-green.” (She felt that the hyphen constituted a visual hiccup.)

Mine is excessive dialogue tags. I remain fully aware that numerous copy editors hold the opposing view here, and feel that any line of speech without a tag assigning it to a speaker is a glaring lapse. But it drives me crazy.

Allow me to illustrate.

“Is this your bow tie?” she said. She held it out.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I never wear bow ties. I put live snakes around my neck and stick luminescent jewels on my forehead.”
She cocked her head to one side. “How do you make them adhere?” she wanted to know.
“I dip them in the sap of an Aztec Murder Tree,” he explained.
“Where do you find those?” she asked.
“I have one in my apartment,” he explained.
“Just for the sap?” she probed further.
“Also for the way it smells, but yeah, mostly for the sap,” he replied. “And with a luminescent jewel on my forehead and a live snake around my neck, who needs a bowtie?”
“I can’t argue with that,” she said. “But what about when you sweat?”
“It doesn’t bother the snake,” he stated.
“I meant vis-à-vis the forehead adherence issue,” she clarified.
“You underestimate the holding power of the sap of the Aztec Murder Tree,” he told her.

OK, OK, I could go on like this all day. But don’t you find the presence of dialogue tags in every single fucking sentence irritating? Or at least distracting? To me, it really disrupts the flow.

Now, for contrast, read the same passage without any tags at all, just dialogue and action:

“Is this your bow tie?” She held it out.
He shook his head. “No. I never wear bow ties. I put live snakes around my neck and stick luminescent jewels on my forehead.”
She cocked her head to one side. “How do you make them adhere?”
“I dip them in the sap of an Aztec Murder Tree.”
“Where do you find those?”
“I have one in my apartment.”
“Just for the sap?”
“Also for the way it smells, but yeah, mostly for the sap. And with a luminescent jewel on my forehead and a live snake around my neck, who needs a bowtie?”
“I can’t argue with that. But what about when you sweat?”
“It doesn’t bother the snake.”
“I meant vis-à-vis the forehead adherence issue.”
“You underestimate the holding power of the sap of the Aztec Murder Tree.”

Now doesn’t that have a much nicer rhythm? It’s brisk, it’s snappy, and there is never any doubt who is speaking. I feel dialogue tags should only be used in cases where there might otherwise be some reasonable degree of confusion about who is doing the talking.

“I feel I have made my point,” the author said, speaking pompously in the third-person voice.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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