Dialogue Ear

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name: dialogue-ear
description: "Diagnose the dialogue in a writer's scene or script: distinct voices, subtext, on-the-nose lines, exposition dumps, power shifts, rhythm, attribution, and whether each exchange changes something. Use when dialogue feels flat, stiff, expository, or interchangeable between characters, or when a writer wants to test whether a conversation is doing dramatic work. Quotes the exact lines and explains effects without rewriting the characters' speech."
---

# Dialogue Ear

Listen to the writer's dialogue the way an actor, a director, and an editor would. Find where it lives and where it goes dead, quote the exact lines, and explain why. The characters' words stay the writer's.

## Gather what matters

Work from the actual pages. Useful context, if available:

- who the speakers are and what each wants in this scene;
- what the scene must accomplish in the larger story;
- form (prose fiction, screenplay, stage play, memoir) and genre;
- what the writer suspects is wrong.

If context is missing, infer each speaker's apparent want from the text and label it as inference.

## Listen in four passes

### 1. Voice

Cover the attributions. Can you tell who is speaking? For each character, note vocabulary, sentence length, rhythm, formality, verbal tics, and what they avoid saying. Flag stretches where voices merge, and quote the interchangeable lines.

### 2. Subtext

For each exchange, ask what each speaker wants and what they actually say. Mark lines where characters state feelings, motives, or themes outright ("I'm angry because you never listen") and describe what the scene loses when the subtext surfaces. Mark the strongest lines where meaning runs underneath, so the writer knows what to protect.

### 3. Work

Identify the beat where something changes: power, information, intimacy, or stakes. Flag exchanges where nothing shifts. Identify exposition aimed at the reader rather than the listener ("As you know, Bob..."), pleasantries that stall, and arguments that repeat a point without escalation.

### 4. Sound and mechanics

Read for rhythm: speech lengths, interruptions, silence, overlap. Check tags and beats. Note over-modified tags ("she said angrily"), adverb crutches, action beats that repeat the line's meaning, and anything confusing about who speaks. Check dialect and accent rendering for readability and respect; suggest conveying voice through syntax and word choice rather than phonetic spelling.

## Deliver a Dialogue Report

### What's alive

Two to four exchanges that work, quoted, with the reason each works.

### Voice map

A short profile of each speaker's voice as it currently appears on the page, plus where they blur.

### Where it goes flat

Up to five flagged moments. For each, quote the lines, name the problem (on the nose, exposition, no turn, voice blur, rhythm), and describe the effect on the reader or audience.

### The turn

Where the scene's power or knowledge shifts, or a note that it does not yet shift.

### Experiments

Up to three small things to try in the next draft, such as cutting the last line of each speech, having a character answer a different question than the one asked, replacing a stated feeling with an action or silence, or reading the exchange aloud and marking where you run out of breath.

## Boundaries

- Do not rewrite dialogue. If the writer asks for an example of a technique, demonstrate it on an invented two-line exchange, not on their characters.
- Preserve deliberate stylization: Pinteresque pauses, Sorkin-style overlap, dialect, and genre conventions are choices, not errors.
- End with one question for the writer about what a key character wants in the scene, since most dialogue problems start there.