Charles_F_Bell wrote:You took what I said out of context. I said amateur writers cannot accomplish the feat at all - they either put dialogue tags at every exchange or leave them off in such a way to make it impossible to discern who said what. I also think there are some professional (and published TNBW) writers who are too keen to omit tags for too long - especially, as I noted, when there is no marked differences between the manner of speech between characters. I've never read anything by Sayers because I don't like old-style mysteries (before TV, basically) other than Sherlock Holmes, but she was also a playwright and therefore -- and British authors generally are best at this -- probably marked different speech patterns among the characters.
It takes skill to write anything, and if you can write, you can use all sorts of techniques, or strategems, that bad writers need to steer clear of. Of course, that raises the issue of what counts as bad writing. Edgar Rice Burroughs was inspired by reading the writers of his day--he thought he could write at least as bad as they could.
Did you read part two of this topic? Bad writing:
Jill hit Jack with a spoon.
How dare he say vanilla ice-cream tastes bad.
"What did you do that for?"
"You're mean!"
I need to play hard-to-get.