Adapting novels for film almost always involves a process of reduction, condensation and deletion. This can be very frustrating for the writer, but also illuminating. Working on a script, I was struck by how much of the dialogue and narrative description in a given scene in the novel I could dispense with, while still getting across the same point. This does not necessarily mean that the dialogue and description of the original were superfluous. It is a matter of the type of attention demanded of the audience by narrative in each medium, and a matter of the type of redundancy each employs.

I do not mean 'redundancy' in the usual colloquial sense of material which is unnecessary, but in a technical sense. In a novel, such redundancy would include the repeated allusion to certain traits by which characters are identified, as well as speech tags such as 'he said'. Strictly speaking a character trait needs to be described only once, but it assists comprehension if we are constantly reminded of jt. And usually we can infer who is speaking in a scene of dialogue from the content and layout on the page, but speech tags make reading easier Stage drama, which consists mostly of speech, imitates and reproduces the redundancy of real speech with various degrees of stylisation.

In some modern dramas, this is taken to an extreme, so that the dialogue seems to consist almost entirely of redundant language, whose function is purely phatic (merely establishing contact between the two speakers), leaving us in the dark as to what is being communicated.