Journalists are taught to use said because other verbs often imply a judgement about the person. I think said is usually transparent, so I tend to use it myself, but there are plenty of situations where other words are better.

Polter, you should take that to spoilers and delete here.

On the said issue, I've always preferred an attribution by action.

"No," the conductor's baton descended in a savage stroke and he turned to the first violin. "Did you study music in a cave? Play that line again."

No "said" in sight.

Also, as much as I love Cherryh's sf, she's one of the few writers who can do lyrical mythology and fantasy just as well as hard-edged science.

On the "said" debate, I was an English major and I'm in favor of variety or nothing. Said for every single quote is boring and often just plain inaccurate.

As Lyra said (commented), a good many words have a subjective meaning. Consequently, context is everything. I work right now for a mainstream daily newspaper. We're pretty insistent on using "said." And really, there's only so artsy you can get when covering a zoning commission meeting. Other places I've worked, most notably alt. weeklies and other places where the flavor of the moment is more important than pinpoint objectivty, my subjects were free to guffaw and caterwaul and spit through clinched teeth.

One of the joys of screenplays. No "said" anywhere.

Randomly dropping in to add my two cents....

One of the joys of screenplays. No "said" anywhere.

Abso-fucking-lutely.

It's like Literature for the Attention Span Deficient.

As Lyra said (commented), a good many words have a subjective meaning. Consequently, context is everything. I work right now for a mainstream daily newspaper. We're pretty insistent on using "said."

Absolutely. Said in newspapers is just fine by me. Newspapers ought to be striving for objectivity and language is a huge part of that. (Although there are times when I think newspapers should give up on the objectivity thing and just go with their biases, trusting the readers to recognize them and adjust their understanding accordingly.) In literature, though, I generally expect and want subjective meaning.

Crichton is Stephen King

OK Gus -I know took some heat for this. I think though in a way King deserves. Not King at his best - at his best, King can take the conventional horror tropes, and use them in first rate writing - good character, good dialog, sometimes even convincing world building. I though Carrie and Firestarter were fine pieces of writing. Stand By Me imay be one of his best short stories (and I know - conventional wisdom here. What can I say? Conventional wisdom is sometimes right.)

But the worst of King is as bad as Crichtons stuff. The Green Mile, in addition to everything else had the most offensive Magical Negro ever - [Green Mile Spoiler white fonted]on top of childlike gentle simplicity, saintlike ability to forgive, and magical superpowers exclusively at the service of white folks - he also was willing to die for a crime he was innocent of, obstensibly because he was "tired", but really cause he would have inconvenienced a lot of kindly white folks who would have had to take some heat for letting him live. [Ok he got even a little bit - one of the most gentle, saintlike bits of revenge in literary history. I get the feeling that ,given the choice, the "victim" would not have undone it.]

Crichton is apparently incapable of doing better. King has done better. When he produces that level of crap, maybe he deserves MORE heat than MC does -certainly no less.