Forever changing my writing, the 'he said' 'said he' debate. · 1:46pm Sep 7th, 2015

I have come to a realization that will forever reverse my writing style. I will change to the format ‘she said’ for speech actions/noun relations rather than ‘said she’.

Just now I was working on a new story that had piqued my interest. I had decided to change my actions for speech to have it come after the name in an attempt to try something new and then I saw that I had already started a paragraph as follows.

Rarity snickered.

I saw this, noticed it because it was something I didn’t need to change, and it all clicked together for me.

You see, I’ve had the debate on whether to include the action verb before or after the speaker’s name/pronoun when placed after the speaking line for a number of years now. That debate always seems to be rekindled by the fact that some people are bothered by the action coming first. But I prefer the action coming first as I find it more efficient. When scanning text I can easily note the word said, or the action will stand out as not being said. I find it smooth and easy to read. I also find that ending sentences on a word that is easily skippable tends to detract from the sentence and often affects the transition between paragraphs.

However, when I read the above line it clicked, as I said, and I noticed that sometimes, when starting a paragraph with the line that states who is speaking, you don’t include the verb first. It would be awkward to read more often than not.

Now I don’t feel that this awkwardness carries over to more than the first line of a paragraph, at least most of the time. But, it does make the writing inconsistent and that does matter. In addition, it highlighted just why having the verb first might bother people.

Thus, I will forever be changing my writing, sans finishing chapters for stories that already have one chapter posted, by having the verb come second. Though, there might be exceptions if I feel that a particular story merits the difference.

Now, neither format is technically wrong. However, I can now see why it matters to some people to have the noun come first AND with the identification of occasional inconsistencies I feel that having the verb come first is now inappropriate.

There are, of course, other arguments for or against each format, however I always felt that they balanced out. My realization, however, does not seem to have an equivalent argument against it.

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