Editing Tip of the Day: The Dreaded "Said"

We've done a few posts on how to improve your dialogue and your dialogue tags. (You can read them here for a quick refresher.)
Today we'll give you one quick reminder, and one quick tip to make your editing easier.

1. Remember that "said" is neutral. The reader's eye skims over it.
You want to trim down your dialogue tags, sure, but you also don't want to overdo it by replacing "said" with too many alternatives. The farther you go from simple choices like "said", "replied", or "answered", the more noticeable the dialogue tag becomes. And this is one instance where you don't want your word choice to be noticeable, because it tends to disrupt the flow of the narrative. Eliminating a tag altogether, using action to clue the reader in to who's talking, or using said are generally all better choices than "he remarked."

2. If you want to focus on dialogue tags during an edit, use your search/find function in your word program and search for ,". If you search for the comma+close quotation marks combination, you'll find all the places where you used a dialogue tag. And if you have a habit of using too many tags (or of using too many adverbs with your dialogue tags) in your early drafts, using the Find function lets you write those early drafts without having to agonize over every tag, because you know you can fix them later.
Just make sure you do remember to go back and fix them later.