How Happy I Am to See You, He Burbled
4 min readJun 4, 2019
Many writers believe they should avoid using “said” as a dialogue tag. Not so! The point of a dialogue tag is to be invisible: what you want readers to focus on is what was said, not how it was said. Using too many other words, some of which require mental gymnastics to read and assimilate, calls attention to the wrong place altogether.