Are You Making These Mistakes With Dialogue Tags and Action Beats?

Ever read through a passage of dialogue in your manuscript and think it somehow sounds. . . off? All the components are there: snappy spoken lines, speaker identification, even a bit of action thrown in. But weirdly, the conversation doesn’t read like the books you devour, or something about the exchange simply doesn’t make sense or have the impact you’re going for. If so, you could be making these simple mistakes with dialogue tags and action beats and causing your dialogue to feel amateurish as a result. Here’s how to fix these subtle but critical missteps and what to avoid in the future.

So what exactly are action beats and dialogue tags? Let’s start with some definitions and examples.

Dialogue Tag: Who Said It and How

Dialogue tags tell your readers all about the conversation: who said what, how they said it, and even sometimes in what sort of way.

Tags specifically use a speaking verb to show that a character opens their mouth and makes a sound.

“Stop!” Officer Friendly said. <— said is a speaking verb. This tag IDs Officer Friendly as the speaker.

“Why should I?” Criminal Joe asked. <— asked is also a speaking verb of another feather. It shows that the response was a question.

“Because I’ll go easy on you,” Officer Friendly lied. <— Yup, lied can be a speaking verb also, because the word still indicates speech.

“You’ll do no such thing!” the criminal replied angrily. <— This dialogue tag tells the reader about the emotion behind Joe’s words.

Dialogue tags do the heavy lifting of identifying speakers, indicating what sort of dialogue was said (a declaration, a question, or something else—like a lie), and even, simplistically, telling readers the emotion the character puts into the words.

They’re the workhorses of writing dialogue, and even if you’re a newbie writer, you probably have intuitive knowledge of how to use them: the dialogue goes between quotation marks, it’s followed by a comma, and then the tag closes the line.

It all works great until something like this pops out:

“You wanna bet on that?” the cop laughed.

Er . . . holy alarm bell, Batman. Is laughed a speaking verb? Well, it’s complicated. (More on that in a bit.)

“I’m not afraid of you,” Joe shrugged.

Wait—Now we have a five-alarm-fire siren! Can a person shrug words? Is shrugged an actual sound that comes out of someone’s mouth?

No. And this might be the source of the subtle nagging that’s telling you your dialogue needs some cleanup.

Action Beat: Shows Character Action

The trick to knowing how to employ action beats is in the name: action. A beat is a bit of character movement or doing that interrupts or follows dialogue. Action beats show the emotion of a character’s speech. They show a character’s habits, traits, intent while they’re speaking. They add flavor, interest, layers to the conversational exchange happening on the page.

Let’s try that last bit of the cop-and-criminal conversation with true action beats instead of dialogue tags.

The cop laughed and put his hand on his gun. “You wanna bet on that?”

(An action beat can come before or after the dialogue, and it’s a good idea to mix up placement to avoid getting repetitive.)

“I’m not afraid of you.” Joe shrugged and looked over his shoulder toward his getaway car.

Dang . . . look at everything that’s packed into those short-ish sentences. Identifies the speakers—check. Shows the emotions and motivations of the characters without telling a reader what they’re feeling or why they’re speaking—check and check. Adds flavor, interest, layers to the conversation. Check, check, and check.

Tags vs. Beats: Punctuation Is Key to Getting Them Right

Now let’s look at the punctuation behind effective action beats and how it differs from dialogue tag punctuation. This is a very common mistake newbie writers make that signals their, well, newbie-ness and leaves readers struggling through an spoken exchange.

Action beat: Quotation mark + line of dialogue + PERIOD + quotation mark + action beat and ending punctuation

“  +  I’m not afraid of you  +  .  +  “  +  Joe shrugged.

Not a comma. A period ends the line of dialogue, and then the action beat is a complete sentence all on its own. It can be short (He shrugged.) or longer (He shrugged and wiped the sweat from his forehead.), but it’s always complete. (Usually. I’ll get into subtleties in part two of analyzing action beats, coming soon.)

Here’s how an action beat’s punctuation differs from a dialogue tag‘s.

Dialogue tag: Quotation mark + line of dialogue + COMMA + quotation mark + dialogue tag and ending punctuation

“  +  Because I’ll go easy on you  +  ,  +  “  +  Officer Friendly lied.

A comma ends the line of dialogue because the dialogue tag (Officer friendly lied) is part of the overall complete sentence.

Watch Out for Sound Verbs

What about those in-between verbs like laughed, breathed, sighed, and the like? Can they be used as dialogue tags? Or should they be action beats?

Let’s look at the conversation again:

“You wanna bet on that?” the cop laughed.

Here are a couple more examples:

“I’ve always wanted to visit Italy,” she sighed.

“It’s beautiful,” he breathed.

There are many opinions about using such sound verbs as dialogue tags, so there’s no one right answer. My opinion is that, while it’s technically possible to laugh/sigh/breathe while saying words, they’re true speaking verbs. They don’t carry the actual speech.

Beyond that, I think using sound verbs this way is lazy writing. A slightly better construction of such tags is to turn them into something like:

“I’ve always wanted to visit Italy,” she said, sighing.

“It’s beautiful,” he replied, the words breathy and wistful.

That way, the action—laughing, sighing, breathing—is separated from the speech, which makes both stronger and more impactful.

But the really magical way to handle those kind of tags? The method that will zip your writing into the stratosphere? Turn them into action beats. I’ll dive into that further and provide examples in a part two, coming soon.

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Want some additional help taking your dialogue from meh to magnificent? Your character conversations might be suffering from something a bit deeper than tag vs. beat mistakes, and I can help you dig deeper with either a Style Tune-Up (line edit + copyedit) or a Story Diagnostic (manuscript assessment). Take a look at how each can help your pages sparkle and send in an application.