Speaker Attributions

So I complain a lot about speaker attributions (also known as dialogue tags).  Just read some of my reviews -- too many adverbs, redundancies, and physical impossibilities -- in published works, which should have been professionally edited.  Here's a good (albeit old) piece I found on the web, explaining to authors why they should avoid certain practices:


The Use and Abuse of Dialogue Tags from Writing-World.com

One issue which is not addressed is word order.  I'll look for something on this later, because it's also important.  (I'm talking about "said Character" instead of "Character said."  Use the second, not the first.  (See Self-Editing for Fiction Writers for advice on the word order here.  Yes, it's a strong tendency and my first manuscript was full of it, but guess what -- I went through all 600+ pages and changed it every time it occurred.  And I'm finding as I work on my second manuscript, that I'm not doing it any longer.)