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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46712
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

All of these answers are correct. I think this is a more technical way to look at it, which may give you some better direction:

All of dialogue has a rhythm, and people reading the dialogue will infer the rhythm from what is on the page. If this were music, the pauses would be demarcated by rests between notes, and they indicate a certain length. In language, the word choice and phrasing have their own rhythm. Longer syllables are slower; short indicative or imperative sentences without filler can be snappier, and they all take some amount of time. Think about the characters' speech as the music notes, and the pauses as the rests, and make the dialogue tags or descriptive actions between lines of dialogue take the same time to read as you want the pause to last.

Those pauses are sometimes called beats, as in this article (which is about writing interesting ones):

[How to amp up the dialogue with emotional beats](https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/improve-my-writing/amp-up-dialogue-with-emotional-beats)

Original score: 2