I'm curious because I want to work on a book with an overlap of deaf culture into a regular story. I anticipate a little less than half of the dialogue will be signed, so I don't know if I can get away with signed and said all the way through. Although, the more I consider it, the less odd it sounds and looks.
Yeah, it would suck to be me if I were down for Khepri action in New Crobuzon, since I'm gay, and Khepri males aren't quite the visage that Khepri females are. </derail>
Yeah, I'm a "said" writer myself. The attributes really only exist to delineate speakers. They're like puppet strings, we're not supposed to see them. If you start festooning puppet strings with beads and sparklers we'll be watching them instead of the limbs they're supposed to be moving. Nobody goes to puppet shows to watch the strings (or do they? I don't know... do people still go to puppet shows?).
Just wanted to weigh in on the "said" vs more colorful dialogue tags debate. Some interesting points have been said (ha ha) here, especially ReptilianAgent's pet peeve of the overuse of the said dialogue tag. I lean towards the said camp, but I think there is a place for adverbs and it isn't a steadfast rule. If there was a steadfast rule, I would argue that you should include fancier dialogue tags when you cannot infer the tone/manner of speaking from the context. As some others have pointed out, it's very easy to tell, for example, when someone is being sarcastic. The dialogue tag here is redundant and bogs down the prose. There are other examples that are much less clear cut. "Would you please just f*ck off?" said Simon. In isolation, it's hard to tell if he's joking or not. I've said this and had it said to me in both ways of speaking. In context, it would obviously be more easy to understand if this is a friendly or hostile relationship, but if this was the first line, or in the first paragraph of a novel, then you might need to clarify the emotion to avoid confusion in the readers. On sign language, it's tricky. My mum worked with children and adults who were deaf. I grew up playing with a lot of the adults (they had learning disabilities). Some of them developed deafness over time, meaning that when they signed, they translated the sign language into words we recognise. Others were deaf from birth, and so the sign language is their language. Lastly, I would use the dialogue tag "said" for sign language. Said doesn't necessarily relate to the spoken word, or speaking, or verbalizing your thoughts. You can say an awful lot just through writing. I wrote a short story a couple of years back with a deaf protagonist. They spoke like this: "Pass me those papers over there," I said. "I want to see what Mr Okada is hiding." The italics are there to show that he is not verbalizing his thoughts. He is still saying them, just not through words. I'm not 100% sure if this is the best way, as that sentence in isolation doesn't let you know the person is speaking in sign language. Then again, I'm not sure if it's important to know that. The fact the protagonist is deaf isn't the point, it's what he's saying that matters.
Speaking of deaf people, how did Nick Andros "speak" it in Stephen King's The Stand? That's a pretty popular book (can't believe I didn't think of it earlier)... anybody remember?
Eh, in my projection, that would get tricky for scenes where a speaking person is signing and some people present wouldn't know. But I think it will be need to be treated like any language foreign to some of the characters.
