Said-isms

[rolanni]

All righty, then.

I just read a reader review of a book (not one of ours) in which the reviewer was bitching and moaning about all the said-isms in the book. People never just said anything, the reviewer complained (um, oops), they whispered, murmured, hissed, cried, mumbled, &c -- and everyone knew that was Just Wrong.

Well, I'm going to 'fess up; I didn't know that it was wrong. And I'm going to go one step farther; "said" is an awfully boring word. Oh, it has its uses, and use it I do. But, honestly, if someone has murmured, why not say so? If she mumbles, or stammers at a certain point, that might, yanno, be a Clue. I'd think a whole page of dialogue broken only by "said" would put me right to sleep. Granted, I could be in a minority here.

So, I have some questions.

The first is, where do you learn that "said-isms" are "wrong?" and how come I never got the memo?

The second is, what are your feelings about "said-isms":

[Poll #1222698]

or -- feel free to discuss in comments.

Comments

[redbird]

They're one of the things that's easy to do badly. (TNH gives the example of an author writing that someone "hissed" a sentence that contained no sibilants.) I suspect this is part of why people are told to avoid them altogether. And yes, if overused they distract from the actual conversation and events. Sometimes it's relevant that a character yelled or whispered. If an entire dialogue goes "said, spoke, shouted, mentioned, whispered, confided...." with a different verb at each line, that's likely to distract the reader (at least this reader) from what is being said.