Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: adam@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Adam Justin Thornton)
Subject: Re: Whizzard rides again! (Yeehaw!)
Message-ID: <1994Sep18.144013.24117@Princeton.EDU>
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Date: Sun, 18 Sep 1994 14:40:13 GMT
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In general, I'd say excellent advice.  However, I'd warn against doing too
much dialect.  Unless you _are_ Mark Twain, you're probably only going to
make the text harder to read by using funny spellings to indicate accent.

An excellent example of this occurs in the new Nick Cave novel; he tries to
give his characters a southern accent, but as he's Australian and clearly
doesn't know shit about the south, he just ends up sounding like an
incompetent imitator of Faulkner on heroin.

Which he is.  But that's not the point.  The point is, it's a lot better
(IMNSHO) to have:

	Big Daddy Julepbreath waves you to a seat.  "Well now, boy.
	Explain to me just what the hell you was doing up in that barn loft
	with my bluetick hound Mabel."

rather than

	Big Daddy Julepbreath waves you to a seat.  "Whale naow, boah.
	'Splain to me just whut the hail you was doin' up in that barn loft
	with mah bluetick hound Mabel."

You can still convey nuances of tone, inflection, and regional color--like
"was" with second person singular, without making your reader's life more
difficult.  Whizzard, if you will notice, does this in his example: Sam's
Brooklyn vowels aren't spelled out as such, but I certainly have no trouble
hearing them.

Adam
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