Howdy, 'allo, Yo: Five tips for researching dialect

My book in progress occurs largely in north central Pennsylvania, where I grew up. However, I've lived my entire adult life in Philadelphia, so I've forgotten some things, especially the dialect.

For a number of reasons, I never really embraced the local dialect in my rural hometown. My urbane older siblings mocked the "hick speak" whenever they visited. My parents are from Montana and Minnesota and their western and midwestern turns of phrase stuck with me far more than localisms. A few I remember: "warsh" for "wash," "redd up" for "tidy," "crick" for "creek." But the other elements of the dialect I can't quite reconstruct from memory. Thus, over the past few summers I took trips north to research dialect (cleverly disguised as family vacation time at a wonderfully old-timey amusement park, Knobel's, situated in the heart of "Pennsyltucky").

If you use a regional dialect in your work, here are some things to listen for when researching:

Regional pronunciations

Photo by Nika Vee, wikimedia commons

While I'm no fan of badly tortured spellings to represent dialect, a few well-placed phonetic misspellings can be effective. Here in Philly, the locals walk "down the shtreet," for example. (Okay, to my ears, it sounds more like "downa shtreet" but that's hard to read.)

Colorful idioms
My dad's westernisms like "in a coon's age" and "if it was a bear, it would've bit ya" speak volumes about the abundant wildlife in his region. Ask someone from New Hampshire and from Idaho to complete this sentence: "this winter has been as cold as ____," you'll get very different answers, usually based on local culture.

Word choice
When I moved to Michigan for grad school, I quickly learned that I'd crossed the great "pop" divide and could no longer expect to get anything but carbonated water if I asked for "soda." There's regional variation for all kinds of terms: supermarket or grocery store? Laundry or wash? Water fountain or drinking fountain or bubbler?

And what foreign words have worked their way into common use? Here on the East coast, Yiddish words including "chutzpa" and "schlepp" are common among urbanites. In Louisiana, French terms slip in frequently.

Word order
How grammatically one strings together sentences is determined partly by education and socio-economic status, and partly by region. You know the "rule" against ending sentences with prepositions? The Mid-Atlantic dialect turns it on its head, adding unnecessary prepositions: "Where are you at?" and "Where is she going to?" In parts of England, questions are often doubled: "Having a good holiday, are you?" or "Shall I Hoover the floor, yes?"

Cadence
Being able to hear and replicate the rhythm of a dialect is perhaps the most difficult skill you need to write convincing characters from a region other than your own. If you're musically inclined or have been trained in writing poetry, you have a bit of an advantage. It still takes a lot of listening to master. Aside from total immersion, it helps to have recordings to revisit and study.

Do any of your characters speak in a dialect that's different from yours? How did you research it? What regional speech variations have you noticed when you travel?

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Tips for avoiding the dreaded label "purple prose"

Today is my final installment of my series on "Reducing Bloat / Revising Overwriting."

Overly elaborate diction is what most think of when they hear the term "overwriting." I'd argue it's just one facet of a tendency to go thick, lush and heavy-handed when drafting. The trick is to identify and correct it during revision.

Advanced vocabulary
Your characters' word choices show us who they are, so it's important to be accurate. Generally word choices should be consistent with a character's age, level of education and socio-economic status. Just as a fifth grader wouldn't discuss post-feminist hegemony, a college professor wouldn't call his enemy "stinkypants."

There are exceptions, however. You might sprinkle in words like "indubitably" and "elementary" to show that your fifth grader fancies himself an amateur sleuth like Sherlock Holmes. A social climber might adopt fancy lingo but misuse it. A grade-skipping child prodigy would wield her vocabulary like a weapon.

As you revise, be willing to question your word choices. Advanced vocabulary can communicate some things you don't intend. It gives the impression that you, the writer, are insecure or a bit out of touch. It can also taint your characters with a popular stereotype: the evil genius whose intelligence is paired with heartless ambition, or the socially awkward hopeless nerd whose head is stuffed with useless knowledge.

Literary devices
As I wrote in this post, sound devices can be an effective tool to make your work sing. But if you're too heavy-handed, it sounds silly or just plain annoying. Generally assonance (repeated internal vowel sounds) is less jarring than alliteration (repeated initial consonant sounds) or rhyming, so you can be a little freer with it.

How heavy is too heavy? I don't have a hard and fast rule. If sound is a big piece of your style, you'll have a hard time identifying overkill. Ask three or four trustworthy readers who get your intent to help you trim all but the best of your devices.

Metaphor and simile can quickly become overdone. Beware of the tendency to describe every detail through comparisons. Watch out especially for inept comparisons that don't fit the character or situation. Stephanie Thornton posted some hilarious examples of simile gone awry.

A whole-work "controlling metaphor" or motif is often fine, however. If done well, it can unify and strengthen your work. Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key, for example, uses the motif of doors, keys, fences, houses to examine what makes a place home, and people around us family.

Allusion can be an effective way to say a lot in a small space--your reader will pour in all the context without your needing to explain. But if the book, film, song or historical event you reference is too obscure, it hinders rather than helps your reader. A character whose thoughts are filled with allusions to pop culture will come across as shallow and lacking original ideas of his own.

Name dropping brands is another type of allusion that becomes irksome quickly. Call your fleece jacket a "North Face" once, then stick with generic terms like fleece or jacket in subsequent reference.

Dialect
Take extra care when presenting a character whose regional accent isn't mainstream. The best way to handle dialect is through word order, cadence, grammar, and word choice. But go lightly, especially with regionalisms like "youse guys" or "blimey" or "y'all." And as much as possible, stick to standard spellings. If you've done your research and can imitate the cadence and use the right lingo, your readers will "hear" the dialect without the tortured spellings.

Which of these diction areas trips you up? Any other helpful hints to add?

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Compare with flair

Dear Editor-on-call,

Recently I wrote, "He must have been thirteen at the time, as he was about a year older than I was" on the first page I presented at a SCBWI critique session. I was told it should read: "He must have been thirteen at the time, as he was a year older than me."

I think the editor is wrong. What do you say?

Sincerely,
Woe am I
(aka Carmen Ferreiro Esteban)

Dear Woesome,

This is a two-pronged issue. First, we have to consider the grammar rules for comparisons. Second, we should discuss the issue of audience and diction.

Comparisons using "than"

For the record, your instincts are right. Using the objective case--me, her or him--in "than" comparisons is grammatically incorrect.

The rule to remember is that the two things being compared must have parallel grammatical form, tense, voice, case.

Examples:
Incorrect - She is taller than him. (Noun cases don't match: one's subjective, the other objective.)

Correct - She is taller than he is. (Note the verb is repeated for clarity. )

Incorrect - I like Mona more than him. (Both unparallel and ambiguous.)

Correct - I like Mona more than I like him. ("Mona" and "him" are both direct objects.)

Alternate - I like Mona more than he does. (This is a shorthand for saying "I like Mona more than he likes Mona.")

Incorrect- It will be faster to go this way than going that way. (Verb forms don't match: one's an infinitive, the other, a participle.)

Correct: It will be faster to go this way than to go that way.

Voice and diction

When is it preferable to break grammar rules to keep character voices authentic and unstuffy? That depends on a number of things including genre, audience and character voice.

If you write for emerging readers (the under-9 set), consider how teachers will perceive your work. From their perspective, it's more important that proper grammar be continually reinforced so that their students internalize it. They will curse your rule breaking.

As readers age, their grasp of language becomes more sophisticated and fluid. They can better discern a fictional character's voice from, say, a textbook narrator voice. They become aware of dialect and can point to how Huck Finn sounds different from Harry Potter.

In my opinion, the most compelling reason to make a character speak ungrammatically is to convey their lower social class and lack of education or sophistication, or to create contrasts.

A kid raised in the slum is more likely to botch grammar than who attends a posh boarding school. But either kid might assume the speech of the other as an affectation, a mask, to fit in or stand out in a particular environment. Rule breaking for this purpose can be an effective characterization tool.

There certainly are some forms of grammatical correctness that have almost entirely disappeared from speech. Taking the high road means your character's voice will be perceived as uptight and stuffy. You're unlikely to hear a teen use "whom" much anymore. And following the bogus rule that you can't end a sentence with a preposition (which is a Latin grammar rule, not a genuinely English one) will similarly nerdify character voice.

I'd rather spend 300 pages with someone who asks me, "Who should I send this letter to?" than one who asks, "To whom should I send this letter?"

Your example sentence ("He must have been thirteen at the time, as he was about a year older than I was") reads naturally enough. It doesn't seem to me to fall into the "uptight grammatical prig" category. Keep it as you wrote it.

So, readers, what do you think?

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