Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Another important thing: get your terminology right! I find it very distracting, for example, when American authors write books set in Britain, but use American terminology: I'm sure it's equally true the other way around, too. I recently read a (modern) "Sherlock Holmes" story by an American author, who had Watson using words like "sidewalk" and "block" (to measure urban distance); neither or which would ever be used by a British person.
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What Harry said x10.
Get it right for your location
and for your time. The word "scheme" does not mean the same thing in the US as it does in Great Britain. The word "stunt" does not mean the same thing in the US today as it did 100 years ago. People who talk like inhabitants of different times or places from the ones they're supposed to inhabit not only break the reader's immersion in the story, they smash it to bits and jump up and down on the bits. Someone who is supposedly in the RAF of World War II speaking like a modern American (something I read recently in amateur work) is just as jarring to someone who sees that as the same person with a cell phone. Or mobile.