Post by mfelizandy on Feb 25, 2009 4:13:50 GMT
...Into Shape. (Man, I wish we could do longer thread titles on these boards!)
I've heard a lot of would-be writers say, "I write just like I talk." These people are often surprised that their stories don't turn out well. There's a very good reason why stories written "just like I talk" don't read well. Here's something I learned as a Linguistics major: English is a double language. There is a set of rules and conventions that applies to spoken English, and another set that applies to written English, and particularly to writing fiction in English.
(For the time being, I'm not going to get into writing dialects and accents and the like--except to say that it's not an easy thing to handle. If you want something of an introduction to dialectal English written well, start with Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is the obvious recommendation, but Twain used dialects in a lot of his writing. The original version of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is another good example of dialectal English (in this case Yorkshire English) used well.)
One of Victor Borge's most popular pieces played off the differences between written and spoken English. Watch a recording of him doing his "phonetic punctuation" sometime, and once you've gotten up off the floor and mopped up the drool, think about why normal spoken English doesn't need punctuation marks.
Once you start comparing them, you start to see why "writing the way I talk" will almost always result in badly-written fiction.
I meant to write a whole lot more on this tonight--but it's bedtime. So I'll go into the misnamed "helping" verbs, the Pitfalls of Passive Voice, synonyms, homonyms, and homophones, tracking herds of wild theasuri, and Throwing Verbal Punches at some other time.
I've heard a lot of would-be writers say, "I write just like I talk." These people are often surprised that their stories don't turn out well. There's a very good reason why stories written "just like I talk" don't read well. Here's something I learned as a Linguistics major: English is a double language. There is a set of rules and conventions that applies to spoken English, and another set that applies to written English, and particularly to writing fiction in English.
(For the time being, I'm not going to get into writing dialects and accents and the like--except to say that it's not an easy thing to handle. If you want something of an introduction to dialectal English written well, start with Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is the obvious recommendation, but Twain used dialects in a lot of his writing. The original version of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is another good example of dialectal English (in this case Yorkshire English) used well.)
One of Victor Borge's most popular pieces played off the differences between written and spoken English. Watch a recording of him doing his "phonetic punctuation" sometime, and once you've gotten up off the floor and mopped up the drool, think about why normal spoken English doesn't need punctuation marks.
Once you start comparing them, you start to see why "writing the way I talk" will almost always result in badly-written fiction.
I meant to write a whole lot more on this tonight--but it's bedtime. So I'll go into the misnamed "helping" verbs, the Pitfalls of Passive Voice, synonyms, homonyms, and homophones, tracking herds of wild theasuri, and Throwing Verbal Punches at some other time.
