"I guess Tom’s ears would burn if he could hear your praises, Mr. Damon," laughed Mr. Swift. "Don’t spoil him."

"Spoil Tom Swift? You couldn’t do it in a hundred years!" cried Mr. Damon, enthusiastically. "Bless my topknot! Not in a thousand years—no, sir!"

"But where is he?" asked Mr. Peterson, who was evidently unused to the extravagant manner of Mr. Damon.

"There he goes now!" exclaimed the gentleman who frequently blessed himself, some article of his apparel, or some other object.

What’s Wrong with this ?

Well for starters, the Tom swift stories were so full of this kind of dialogue, the term "Tom Swifty" became a parlor game. take these example, which are humorous, but not much worse than what was actually published:

"How much for the William Shatner poster," Tom said enterprisingly.

"Where are the handcuffs?" Tom said arrestingly.

"I like it when you do that," Tom Ejaculated.

The problem here is that the writer does not trust the simple word "Said."

"I saw you," he said.

"I saw you too," she said.

Then he said, "Well, Didn’t you say anything?"

It gets the job done, but it gets boring. so beginning writers try to dress it up using bigger words and more adverbs. They forget that "Said" is unobtrusive. it’s nearly invisible and for the reader is just a kind of placeholder. Often, It’s not even needed:

"I saw you."

"I saw you too."

"Well, Didn’t you say anything?"

Again, It’s banal, but between two characters it’s easy to tell who said what. If your characters have something to actually say, you can keep track of them other ways too, like this passage from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s A Door Through Space (1961):

But only a minute. Then one of the mob yelled, "We’ll go if you give’m to us! He’s no right to Terran sanctuary!"

I walked over to the huddled dwarf, miserably trying to make himself smaller against the wall. I nudged him with my foot.

"Get up. Who are you?"

The hood fell away from his face as he twitched to his feet. He was trembling violently. In the shadow of the hood I saw a furred face, a quivering velvety muzzle, and great soft golden eyes which held intelligence and terror.

"What have you done? Can’t you talk?"

He held out the tray which he had shielded under his cloak, an ordinary peddler’s tray. "Toys. Sell toys. Children. You got’m?"

I shook my head and pushed the creature away, with only a glance at the array of delicately crafted manikins, tiny animals, prisms and crystal whirligigs. "You’d better get out of here. Scram. Down that street." I pointed.

A voice from the crowd shouted again, and it had a very ugly sound. "He is a spy of Nebran!"

Look at what Bradley does here. Not a single said, but it’s easy to tell who’s saying what through the use of action and dialect. Keep the Tom Swifites out of it.

Dismissed.