The process of refining and improving your characters' dialogue during editing to make it sharper, more natural, and more purposeful.
Dialogue revision is the focused editing pass where you refine what your characters say and how they say it. This involves cutting dialogue that delivers exposition too bluntly, layering in subtext so characters talk around what they really mean, and sharpening each character's distinct voice so readers can tell who's speaking without checking the tag. It's one of the most impactful revision passes you can make because dialogue is where readers pay the closest attention.
Dialogue is the first thing that feels 'off' to a reader when it isn't working. Stilted, on-the-nose, or same-sounding dialogue breaks immersion faster than almost any other craft problem. A dedicated dialogue revision pass can transform a flat draft into something that crackles with personality and tension.
Read each character's lines in isolation. If they all use the same vocabulary, sentence length, and speech patterns, you need to differentiate. Give each character at least one verbal habit that's uniquely theirs.
People stumble, trail off, and change direction mid-sentence. If every line is a perfectly formed thought, the conversation will feel scripted. Leave in some roughness.
"I hate you," she said angrily" is the dialogue doing the work twice. If the words carry the emotion, you don't need the adverb. Let the dialogue speak for itself.
Dialogue that looks fine on the page can sound terrible when spoken. Read every conversation out loud, or better yet, have two people read the parts. Your ear catches what your eyes miss.
Take a two-person conversation from your manuscript and strip out every dialogue tag and action beat. Read just the raw dialogue lines. Can you tell who is speaking from voice alone? If not, revise until each character has a distinct pattern: different sentence lengths, different word choices, different ways of approaching the topic.