Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
The way Gregg wants to write it is the way someone might say it, if they were musing aloud, to themselves, or thinking it. However, reading it that way is at best clunky. And nobody would say the sentence that way, certainly not in the company of someone else within earshot.
The whole POINT of learning to write dialogue properly is to avoid this very issue. If we wrote dialogue the way people speak (replete with the uhrs, ums, and y'knows), nobody would read that crap.
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One of the most effective attacks on a redneck state legislator that I ever saw, back in the McCarthy era, was based on this very fact.
The legislator, a major power in state politics at the time, had attacked a popular journalism professor and subpoenaed him to appear before an investigative committee. Since the professor was a close friend of most of the reporters covering the occasion, one of them was inspired to hire a court reporter to attend the hearing and take notes. The reporter also alerted the professor to his plan.
Next morning, the account was spread across all eight columns of the state's leading newspaper, in Q&A format. It began with a verbatim quote from the legislator:
"Where at was you all borned at?"
The professor's replies were all carefully crafted to make perfect reading, rather than being normal speech.
The investigation ended right there. And it was the legislator's final term in office.
Back to the point of this thread: I think one of the best ways to learn good writing is to study the works of those who already know how. In the present case, I think one of the best examples of dealing with what might be considered "internal dialog" is to be found in the several Liaden Universe novels that deal with Daav yos Phelium and his late lifemate Alleiana Caylon. Lee and Miller never leave you in the slightest doubt about what's going on, and their grammatical accuracy never makes itself obvious.