Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue

Conversations don't take place in a vacuum. Other things don't stop happening just because characters are talking. Many beginning writers forget this, writing long chunks of dialogue without any narration or dialogue tags to break it up, and in the process, the reader becomes lost in the Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue.
The reader is given no reminders of the setting in which the dialogue actually occurs: For all they know, the scene could be completely bare and blank, with nothing to look at, no other characters and absolutely nothing occurring whatsoever aside from the dialogue in question. In the very worst cases, the writer may fail to even set the scene in the first place, giving the reader absolutely nothing at all to visualize what's happening. Another problem is that it's easy to lose track of who's saying what, especially if there are more than two characters involved in the conversation.
Sometimes an author may do this on purpose, for example to keep it appropriately vague. 
Compare Scriptfic; indeed, many examples of this trope are scriptfics clumsily converted into prose to get around FanFiction.Net's ban of the format.
Category:Terminology