I’ll support grautry position too. The content of the dialogue itself should indicate a musing, a question, a counter, an apology, a suggestion, an urging—using the superfluous words “mused”, “asked’, “questioned”, “countered”, “apologized”, “suggested”, “urged” is very very clumsy.
And some of your other suggested words like “stated” instead of “said”, and “retorted” instead of “replied” don’t even seem to be trying to indicate anything other than the desire to use a synonym. In which case the story is no longer about communicating anything, or depicting a scene, but instead a game of how much of a thesaurus you can use.
This is the sort of suggestion that I’ve seen the fanfiction.net forums actually give out to writers—new writers actually go there and say “I want more synonyms for the word ‘said’”!
And the people there instead of saying “No, you don’t, you need less synonyms”, actually do offer suggestions for more synonyms. It’s just horrid horrid advice.
I’ll support grautry position too. The content of the dialogue itself should indicate a musing, a question, a counter, an apology, a suggestion, an urging—using the superfluous words “mused”, “asked’, “questioned”, “countered”, “apologized”, “suggested”, “urged” is very very clumsy.
And some of your other suggested words like “stated” instead of “said”, and “retorted” instead of “replied” don’t even seem to be trying to indicate anything other than the desire to use a synonym. In which case the story is no longer about communicating anything, or depicting a scene, but instead a game of how much of a thesaurus you can use.
This is the sort of suggestion that I’ve seen the fanfiction.net forums actually give out to writers—new writers actually go there and say “I want more synonyms for the word ‘said’”! And the people there instead of saying “No, you don’t, you need less synonyms”, actually do offer suggestions for more synonyms. It’s just horrid horrid advice.