coaltide | Coal Rivalry

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2025

Coal Rivalry

All the things Coal said, running through my head.

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da

You can't shrug a word, so it's an error. I'm assuming things like:

"Don't go in there!" he ejaculated.

"Why not," he entreatied.

"I think it's probably fine," the other person opined.

"No!" he vociferated.

"But--"

"I said no!" he expostulated.

So
"I guess." He shrugged.

Instead?

DC yes, dialogue, period, and then action in a new sentence is correct (I believe). Or:
"Like so," he said, shrugging.
"This, maybe," he said, and shrugged.

"But what if—" She shrugged. "—in the middle of the dialogue?"

DC

Personally I'm pretty okay with "He shrugged", "he smiled" and other non-speech words used in dialogue because I just interpret it as a more concise way of saying "He said with a shrug/smile".

That's what action tags are for. By which I mean, if you write something like this:

"Here is some dialogue." He did the thing.

... it will be understood that he's doing the thing while or immediately after saying the dialogue. The difference between this and a dialogue tag is that a dialogue tag is part of the same sentence as the dialogue, whereas the action tag is a new sentence because it's a separate action from speaking.

CYRT

IMO the limitation of that is that it does tend to read as the thing happening after the dialogue, not during.

Most of the time it's perfectly okay, but it's not quite a full substitute.

+1

I will read "'Oh well.' Blorbo shrugged." as Blorbo shrugging after he said "Oh well", not while he said it. I think a period and a new sentence is the worst way to write action happening at the same time as speech.

"'Oh well,' Blorbo said with a shrug." and "'Oh well,' Blorbo said, shrugging." are both a lot better.

It is technically incorrect, irritating, and will make me instantly close out of anything but a gift fic

CYRT

Well, yeah... It registers as technically incorrect and irritating because it's not what you're trained to expect as "good grammar". But language is fluid (and ultimately a social construct), and when "incorrect" ways of writing become common, it often reflects a response to some awkward limitation (in this case, dearth of non-clunky dialogue tags, as discussed in the thread).

Think about it this way: there's a pretty high degree of abstraction and metaphors involved in how we read dialogue tags already. E.g. we understand that Blorbo "hissing" a threat does not mean he's actually making hissing noises (though there's a small subset of readers who take issue with dialogue tags like hissing, too!) This kind of reading expanding to include actions that occur concurrently with speaking wouldn't be a very weird way for writing style to develop.

No you can just use a period instead. It's not that we have no way to go from dialogue to action in English.

+1

That's more of a style preference. Absolutely valid for someone to not want to read anything that is in a style they dislike, but there are professionally published and edited books that use these sorts of dialogue tags so it's unlikely to go away anytime soon.

+2

And there have been for a long time! They are very common in early 20th century popular fiction, for example.

This. I don't use them myself, not least because I think "he said with a shrug/smile" sounds smoother, but they're a total non-issue for me as a reader and don't in any way impact my reading experience.

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Coal Rivalry

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