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“Said” is a good, solid word. Don’t look down on it.

Some writers – particularly the inexperienced ones trying to sound sophisticated – hamstring their work with a long and weary list of substitutes for “said.” Those substitutes can bog your writing down and distract the reader’s attention from the dialog itself. Here’s an example:

“It’s time to go,” he exclaimed.
“Are you sure?” she uttered.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he averred.
“But I’m not ready,” she asserted.
“We don’t have a choice,” he ejaculated.
“Yes we do. We can stay here and die,” she acknowledged.

Nauseating, right?

Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer series of detective novels, takes the opposite approach, embracing the word “said” with something approaching a lover’s obsession. In his able hands the strategy is refreshing, as the following example from his novel, Double Deuce, shows.

“You working on anything?” Hawk said.
“I was thinking about breakfast,” I said.
“I might need some support,” Hawk said.
“You might?”
“Yeah. Pay’s lousy.”
“How much?” I said.
“I’m getting nothing.”
“I’ll take half,” I said.
“You ain’t worth that,” Hawk said.

Nice. You’ll notice he even used “said” rather than “asked” for questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you should never use verbs such as “asked,” “replied,” “claimed” and so on when writing dialog. I’m simply saying this: Don’t think that you have to do literary somersaults to come up with a lot of distracting substitutes for “said.” The next time you’re tempted to do so, take a few deep breaths, get control of yourself and get back to the basics. Your writing will be better for it.

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Something is wrong with the following sentences – the same error in each sentence. What is it?

• I could of won first place if I had worked a bit harder.
• The saddest words are, “What might of been?”
• I never should of turned my back on Emily.

Did you figure it out?

The problem is this: In each of the sentences, the verb “have” should of have been used instead of the preposition “of.” The corrected sentences would read:

• I could have won first place if I had worked a bit harder.
• The saddest words are, “What might have been?”
• I never should have turned my back on Emily.

One reason why this is an issue in the English language is because of the way we speak. We tend to slur our words rather than articulate them. When slurred, the word “have” sounds a lot like “of.” To make matter worse, we sometimes form contractions of the word pairs “could have,” “might have,” “should have” and so on. They become “could’ve,” “might’ve,” “should’ve,” etc. When we speak those contractions, they sound like “could of,” might of,” “should of,” etc.

Because our tendency is to write the way we speak, it is easy to carelessly substitute “of” for “have.”

Don’t do this! If you do, people will make fun of you. You will be demoted at work. Your personal relationships will fall apart. And, inexplicably (at least from a medical standpoint), you will be plagued with gumboils.

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