“Writers resort to said-bookisms because the two conditionally invisible dialog tags lose their invisibility through overuse.” — I was actually put off from “said” for quite some while after seeing it overused. That and, I must admit, I was inclined to be a little free with “ejaculated” and its ilk.

Nowadays, my rule of thumb is to prevent my own distraction. If I’m getting overwhelmed with a string of “said”s, some need to be moved around and/or deleted. If that’s the second time I’ve seen “exclaimed” on a single page, that’s too much exclamation going one; have somebody throw up their hands and go tagless instead.

The way I figure it, if I can’t see the forest for the trees, I shouldn’t expect my readers to be able to. Words are there to tell the story, not steal attention from it like pesky little thunder thieves. (Sorry, Ejaculated, that goes for you, too.)

I believe (and I practice what I believe) that tags are unnecessary. Good writing, individual characters (both the narrating voice and the speech) and good use of beats (description and/action) should be sufficient to distiguish who says what, even if there are four or five characcters in the conversation.

‘Said’ and ‘asked’ are invisible and who wants to waste time on invisible words when writing a short story, particularly when the word does no more than indetify the speaker. in writing a short story (and longer lengths) every word must contribute to the story, the mood and emotion and to connecting the reader to the characters. Dialogue tags just don’t do that well enough, if at all.