Answer: Word Order for Dialog Tags That Use Pronouns

[chomiji]

china-shop asked us "Does the word order in speech tags change based on whether a pronoun or proper noun is used?"

Or in other words, are there actual rules about whether you should be saying "Sebastian said" or "said Sebastian" - or, for that matter, "He said" or "Said he"?

Comments

[china_shop]

Thank you for this! The one that always trips me up (which I find myself correcting when betaing) is: "Blah blah blah," Peter said. Because it looks so much more natural to me like this: "Blah blah blah," said Peter. But I do get that it's a style thing, rather than being technically wrong, and I appreciate very much how you've set this out. Kudos! :-)

[chomiji]

I'm glad it helped! Thanks for reading!