Why is everyone shouting? Dialog tags and why said is okay.

Woah!  Calm down, guy!

Today, I'd like to talk about dialog tags because I was inspired from seeing some really horrible advice on a FB indie author page.

Dialog is fun to write, at least, I think so, but something keeps coming up and that's dialog tags.  Why do people hate the word 'said' so much?  It perplexes me.  Said is one of those tags that just disappears.  The reader doesn't notice it.  The same can be said of asked.  In a lot of indie published works, I see very few said's.  I see a lot of 'exclaimed', 'quipped', 'shouted', 'stated' etc.  Stop that. Sometimes, people just SAY things.  

When a manuscript is littered with quipped's and exclaimed's, it seems like everyone is either being smarmy and terrible or they're shouting.  It seems melodramatic.  It seems like too much.  And if you throw in a few adverbs, the whole thing turns purple.  

"Hello," he quipped wryly.

"Hi there," she exclaimed charmingly.

"What are you doing?" he wondered dryly.

"Nothing much," she stated blandly.

Waaaaah.  No.  It reads awkwardly.  Adverbs are another bone of contention and probably something I'll write a separate post about.  Their abuse is especially egregious when used in conjunction with 'fancied up' dialog tags.  It's lazy writing.  It's telling.  Not showing.  Which, as we all know, is the cardinal sin of writing.  

Try instead:

"Hello," he said, his smile crooked.

"Hi there," she said, bounding up to him.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing much," she said as she lifted her shoulders in a lazy shrug.

Clearly, not the -best- writing, but you can SEE so much more when you remove the adverbs and the quipped's and exclaimed's.  It presents you with an opportunity to show character action, which naturally, reveals character.  We can picture the scene much better.  Adverbs boil down that lovely description until we can't really see what's going on anymore.  The author is just telling us, but how can we see it and how does it reveal character if we're not left to puzzle it out for ourselves?

I'm not saying that you can -never- use tags like exclaimed, but they should be used sparingly and only when something is -actually- exclaimed or shouted.  Stop being afraid of the word 'said'.  Most of the time?  It really is good enough on its own.  Otherwise, I just picture a scene where the characters are flipping out and yelling at each other.