Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Just to be clear--I never meant that DIALOGUE by characters has to be "grammatically perfect." It has to be readable, and not get in the way. I abhor dialect, for example, when an inexperienced writer feels compelled (historical romances set in Scotland spring instantly to mind) to inflict "dinna" and "ken" and whatever on the reader, rather than dropping it in early and allowing the reader to "hear" it in his/her head as the narrative goes.
|
I would note that "ken" (meaning "know" - essentially the same word as the German verb "kennen") is an everyday word in the north of England and Scotland; it's a word I use in my own speech, although I wouldn't use it in writing here. It's rather different to trying to represent dialect using funny spellings such as "dinna".
I'd personally make a distinction between using normal spellings of words that the reader may perhaps be unfamiliar with, and trying to represent dialect by means of non-standard spelling (as books like "Tom Sawyer" do, for example).