Grinded vs. Ground

[SimonDoom]

Inventive speech tags are the same thing. You don't have to like them, but don't claim that they're grammatically incorrect, because they aren't.

I don't claim that (note my use of "that") they're grammatically incorrect. I think that they're (most of the time) stylistically wrong. It's an indication of less-than-optimal prose choices. Most of the time, they're an indication of overcooked writing.

Not always. But when I see writers going out of their way to choose replacements for "said" and "asked," I think that they are making bad choices and following a wrong standard of what makes good writing. They feel like they have to dress up their writing, when in fact they don't have to, and they'd be better off keeping it simple.

That's me. But it's also what most good published authors do, most of the time, and what most professional editors will say.

 

[IWroteThis]

I could've, but I liked the flow of the one I went with more more. I try to avoid too many tags that aren't said, they tend to stack up and become pretty noticeable if you have a lot of them, and I was already pretty heavy on "he/she whimpered," so I went with a bit more flowy option. It also fit the mood and pacing around it better than the more simple "she whispered," and mood/pacing/flow factors into my decisions around using dialogue vs action tags.

You can also have loud whimpers, medium whimpers, hard whimpers, soft whimpers, all sorts. I wanted to capture the essence of her whimper's fragility, hence the explicit mention of softness.

I'm not a pretentious writer.

Promise.

Guys?

...hello?

And that's your choice. I was simply pointing out that in your example, you weren't using an action tag in place of a speech tag, because it actually was a speech tag. If you just meant instead of the standard "said" speech tag, that's not how I read your comment.