You can’t grin a sentence. I know, I’ve tried. The results made me look like an amateur ventriloquist. So when you next read something like (“Come on in. The water’s great,” he grinned) you may envision a water treading ventriloquist and a floating wooden puppet. To verify, speak a sentence through a nice wide grin.
Said is said to be an invisible word , except when you use it twice in a sentence. Think about when you read dialogue in a novel. When it is peppered with he said, she said, or it said (if it’s Sci-Fi), the action motors along well. This is good. Dialogue is a way of moving the story forward. Adding something like “I can’t swim,” she sniffed, will put the brakes on the flow of the dialogue. If sniffing is important to the scene, how about: “I can’t swim”. Her mouth folded into a frown, punctuated with an audible sniff.
Words that indicate the act of speech are, of course, all right when you need them like ‘shouted’. But the sentence itself can serve to explain how the character is feeling. “Get out of here and never come back.” If you write he said angrily, the dialogue isn’t doing its job. If you need an adverb or an exclamation point, go back and kick up the dialogue instead.
When your character is thinking or acting in a scene, where he also speaks, there’s no need to add he said. The reader will assume that the character is also the speaker.
Be sure to read your dialogue aloud. It is easy to pick up any flaws. Keep an ear out for Rhythm as well.
There is much more to add about dialogue. I’ll save some ideas for next time. Comments are welcome, after all, dialogue moves our story forward.
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