"... Jack said" vs "... said Jack"

Which way round should your speech tags go, and does it matter anyway?

This small but perennial writing question had come up again; maybe you’ve seen it sloshing around on social media. A friend who writes for children posted it thus:

I have been mulling over the said Jack vs Jack said debate. In most middle grade books, the said comes first but I’ve noticed that in adult fiction you’re as likely to get it the other way round. Why is this? Do you have a preference? To my mind, they both become invisible to the reader anyway.

Another friend commented, ‘For some reason Jack said really grates on me and I have really noticed it when reading. I would always go with said Jack. But then - it's always it's he/she/they said. Hmm...’

It reminded me that my MPhil supervisor tried half-seriously to persuade me that my default said Jack was a Bad Thing: that no contemporary writer writes said he, unless they’re deliberately trying to sound olde-worlde - so why would that change just because there’s a name involved?

I remain unreformed, but it’s worth digging into. And the first dig has to be to tease out and pin down what we’re actually talking about.

Photo by Ben Iwara on Unsplash