AppleScript dialog - prompt for a response

A frequent AppleScript question I get is "How do I get information back from a user after I've prompted them with a dialog?" The following example demonstrates how I typically do this. I prompt the user to enter some text, then get their reply back. In this case the reply is stored in the variable named theName.

set theName to the text returned of 
  (display dialog "What is your name?" default answer "")

For your reference, the dialog created by this code looks like this: