Craft Glossary · term

Dialogue — distinct voices (the noun-swap test)

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Plain English: Each character should sound like only themselves — diction, rhythm, register, what they notice — shaped by background and personality.

Rule: Run the noun-swap test: cover the dialogue tags; if you can't tell who's speaking from the lines alone, the voices have collapsed. (This is exactly the repo's craft-audit test.)

Fail: Voice homogenization — everyone speaking in the same articulate narrator-voice. The single most common AI-prose failure in dialogue.

See: Voice / voice homogenization · books/<book>/canon/STYLE_GUIDE.md (cast voice laws)

Arjuna Badger Press · Craft Library

Glossary · Doctrine · Anti-patterns · Triptych form · LLM tells

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