Prose craft
Dialogue tag
The phrase that attributes a line of speech to its speaker, 'she said'; also called identifier, attributive or speaker attribution.
On the page, dialogue "is usually identified by the use of quotation marks and a dialogue tag, such as 'she said.'" The tag carries many names: it is "also known as an identifier, an attributive, a speaker attribution, a speech attribution, a dialogue tag, and a tag line," one job under six labels, telling the reader who spoke. The craft consensus the article records favors the quiet end: Stephen King "asserted that said is the best dialogue tag to use," and the case for it is that said and asked draw no attention to themselves while the words between them carry the voice.
The tag's flashier failure has its own name, the said-bookism; the tagless alternative is the action beat, and the working rule for both is how to write dialogue.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Dialogue in writing fetched 2026-10-20; the same article as cited at /learn/how-to-write-dialogue