The Importance of Dialogue Tag Modifiers

The writer had a weird quirk, some sort of a blindness about dialogue tags. Every single time he used a dialogue tag such as she said, he added a modifier every time. Elmore Leonard: Never use an adverb to modify the verb said. Our job is to make sure our dialogue conveys the meaning rather than adding a rickety adverb to said. Do a global search of the manuscript by pressing control and F at the same time. The global search function will find asked artfully and asked vaguely. My favorite asked inquiringly.