: At the moment, your suggested dialogue is very dry. Every piece of dialogue should ideally serve one of two purposes: 1: Move the plot forward. 2: Expose something about a character/their relationship

@Eichhorn147

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At the moment, your suggested dialogue is very dry. Every piece of dialogue should ideally serve one of two purposes:

1: Move the plot forward.

2: Expose something about a character/their relationship with a character.

A good example of economic usage of a greeting to establish something about characters immediately are the sheepdogs from the looney tunes.

Every day, one punches in to their sheepdog job while the other punches out. They curtly say to each other:

"Morning, Sam."

"Morning, Ralph."

This summarises both their relationship to each other (they cover each other's off shifts) and their role (punch-clock sheepdogs who have as much apathy for their jobs as human punch-clock workers).

Think about what this greeting or introduction is trying to achieve. If it's literally just a polite greeting with no caveats or additional meaning, reconsider having it as a dialogue exchange at all; it could easily be summarised with 'Dr Alfred gave Emily the same milquetoast greeting he gave everyone else', or words to that effect.

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