Readers enjoy dialogue in stories and novels. Those same readers would hate reading court transcripts, even of dramatic confrontations. What makes dialogue interesting and so much actual talk boring? Talk is repetitive, full of rambling, incomplete, or run-on sentences, and usually contains a lot of unnecessary words. Most answers contain echoes of the question. Our speech is full of such echoes. Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes.
