User blog comment:Berglund/Writers Help 1/@comment-24281984-20160417221900

Well, as another writer, I have to respectfully disagree.

The thing about speech tags is that they should be invisible. The reader should be able to pick up not just on what the character is saying, but also how they're saying it based off their body language and tone of voice. Usually, "said" and "asked" should be used around 80-90% of the time, I'd say, 100% if you can manage that.

Still, the word list here is pretty helpful because you can use lots of those words outside of dialogue.