Do you use reporting-clauses in your dialogue, or not bother?

I also use them sparingly, if at all.

I find that if the scene is well established and the characters clearly identified, then the need for reporting clauses is reduced.

More descriptive clauses e.g. he/she exclaimed I never use. The scene itself, the emotional atmosphere etc should already provide the reader with enough understanding of the scene and the character to make this unnecessary - or that is what I hope to achieve.

I tend to follow a mixture of Johnathan's and Victoria's lines on these, particularly during extended conversations. I will break the flow once a characters moves to another position in the room, exhibits a meaningful facial expression, etc, but generally I am quite light on them in dialogue.

On the other hand, there are times when the way a line is spoken is not immediately obvious just from the text, or (particularly with very subtle double-entendres) is not immediately obvious. In these cases, I will use a more descriptive reporting clause.

If it's a mixture of dialogue and scene, I will almost always only use "s/he said" and let the actions going on around the speaker dictate the manner in which it is spoken.

Otherwise known as speech tags.

My tutor once said she couldn't think of any incidence where 'stated' would work better than any other word and we should avoid it. To this day it's still in my prologue. I don't think it's anywhere else in my book but it's the right word on page two so I'm sticking with it.

But generally I avoid most speech tags other than he said/she said and he asked/she asked. They can be quite distracting and jolt the flow of a long dialogue. I think I have occasionally used agreed, exclaimed and declared, but sparingly. I often have a lot of characters involved in a conversation and that's usually distracting enough for my readers.