DIALECT

Folks, in an age of lawsuits and concern over the politically correct, why do writers insist on using dialect? I'm talking about ethnic, cultural, religious, or sexist stereotypes perpetuated by badly articulated mimicry. It is easily as offensive as minstrels and comedians from another era wearing "black face."

Aside from the obvious insulting nature of this practice, it makes your prose hard to read. If your reader has to stop and sound out some phonetic nightmare in order to decipher your meaning, you've lost them. Consider, do you want your reader to wade though something like the following?

I sez ta da guy, "You'se the werst dem sum-bitch I evah met. I'll cet the heart out'n ya. See if'n I doesn't."

Horrible wasn't it? We've had clients tell us to let worse abuses of the English language past our edit (may God help us, the first rule of business is that the customer is always right). I shudder when my wife asks me where to put the apostrophe in "ya'all." The correct answer would be in the trash can. All too often, though, it goes into a manilla envelope on its way to afflict an unhappy publisher. The next time you decide to add some local color to your dialogue, try something like the following.

When I get angry, I speak in the language of the streets. I slur the ends of my words like "youse" and sometimes let them run together like two cars in a wreck as in "sum-bitch."

I said to the guy, "You're the worst son of a bitch I've ever met. I'll cut the heart out of you. See if I don't"

I apologize for the condensed and rather abrupt version. In a saleable story, I would certainly spend more than a couple of sentences developing the flavor and character of the protagonist's voice, and I would have done so much earlier in the story so as not to interrupt the flow of dialogue (more about drama and dialogue later).

The English language has become vastly complex. We rarely speak it the same way as do our neighbors, but we all learned to read from a fairly universal standard. As writers, this standard is our salvation. We try to establish a cadence, a rhythm, and a unique relationship between ourselves and our readers. I have yet to meet a writer who can successfully overcome an interruption to this delicate balance. It seems rather foolish to jeopardize that relationship with bits of phonetic cuneiform.

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Last Revised: 02-Dec-97

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