How to read your own dialogue out loud

Read it standing up, at full volume, in one pass, without stopping to fix anything. The point is not to edit while reading — it is to find the places where your mouth refuses to cooperate. Those are the lines a reader will stumble on silently.

Mark them with a single stroke and move on. When you reach the end, you will have a map of every sentence whose rhythm is wrong, and the marks will cluster: around exposition, around anger, around any scene you wrote quickly and never revisited.

Do it again with the tag lines removed. If you cannot tell who is speaking without them, the problem is not the tags.