Dialogue tag

A dialogue tag is the small attribution attached to a line of speech — 'she said,' 'he asked' — whose only job is to tell the reader who is talking.

Said is nearly invisible. Readers skim past it the way they skim past punctuation, which is exactly what makes it the right word almost every time. The elaborate substitutes — expostulated, chuckled, hissed, ejaculated — draw attention to themselves and usually repeat information the line of dialogue already carried. Editors sometimes call them said-bookisms.

Two technical points are worth knowing.

First, you cannot laugh, smile, shrug or nod a sentence. "Fine," she shrugged is not a tag, because shrugging is not a way of speaking. It needs a full stop: "Fine." She shrugged. At that point it has become an action beat, which is generally the better tool anyway.

Second, an adverb in a tag usually marks a line that is not doing its own work. If she said angrily is necessary, the dialogue has not shown the anger, and the fix is in the dialogue.

Punctuation follows from which one you have used: a tag takes a comma inside the quotation marks and stays lowercase; an action beat takes a full stop and a capital letter.