I feel like I’m almost hate-reading the Immortal Doc Holliday series these days. Every book that comes out, I complain about the dialogue tags the author uses. I’ve talked about drawled, stated, and ground out, and now she’s doing a new one: shrugged. 

I can almost — almost — get on board with the first three. At least those are things you can do with your voice. But a vocal shrug is just a noise; it’s not a full sentence of dialogue. 

And she really uses it a lot. According to my Kindle app, she uses the word “shrugged” 86 times in the book (well, 85 plus once in the free preview at the end). I went through the list and determined that, of the 85 actually in the book, two were questionable and six were used correctly. 

By “correctly” I mean “Character X shrugged and walked out of the room.” In other words, using “shrugged” as an action verb. By “questionable”, I mean the dialogue preceding the “Character X shrugged.” ended with an exclamation point or a question mark, so conceivably “Character X shrugged.” could be its own sentence. 

That means the author dialogue-tagged 77 pieces of dialogue with the word “shrugged”. It became way too repetitive and noticeable — and if I noticed it, surely other readers did as well. 

I also find it difficult to read her dialogue in general, because “said” is so rarely used. In this book, a lot of characters are upset with Doc, so a lot of them growl or snarl — especially Jervis. But even once that’s passed, or even when Doc is with other characters, I still find myself focusing on how annoyed I am with the dialogue tags instead of the actual dialogue itself. 

I’m invested in these characters, so of course I want to know what’s going to happen to them next, but I really think the author needs to sit down with a good editor who will teach her how to correctly tag dialogue. Or, at least, how to do it in such a way that readers don’t notice it.