Writing Advice #?: Donât write out accents.
The Surface-Level Problem: Itâs distracting at best, illegible at worst.Â
The following passage from Sons and Lovers has never made a whit of sense to me:
âI ham, Walter, my lad,â âe says; âtaâe which on âem terâs a mind.â Anâ so I took one, anâ thanked âim. I didnât like ter shake it afore âis eyes, but âe says, âThaâd better maâe sure itâs a good un. Anâ so, yer see, I knowed it was.ââ
Thereâs almost certainly a point to that dialogue â plot, character, theme â but I could not figure out what the words were meant to be, and gave up on the book. At a lesser extreme, most of Quinceyâs lines from Dracula (âI know I ainât good enough to regulate the fixinâs of your little shoesâ) cause American readers to sputter into laughter, which isnât ideal for a character who is supposed to be sweet and tragic. Accents-written-out draw attention to mechanical qualities of the text.
Solution #1: Use indicators outside of the quote marks to describe how a character talks. An Atlanta accent can be âdrawlingâ and a London one âclippedâ; a Princeton one can sound âstiffâ and a Newark one ârelaxed.â Do they exaggerate their vowels more (North America) or their consonants more (U.K., north Africa)? Do they sound happy, melodious, frustrated?
The Deeper Problem: Itâs ignorant at best, and classist/racist/xenophobic at worst.
You pretty much never see authors writing out their own accents â to the person who has the accent, the words just sound like words. Itâs only when the accent is somehow âotherâ to the author that it gets written out.
And the accents that we consider âotherâ and âwrongâ (even if no one ever uses those words, the decision to deliberately misspell words still conveys it) are pretty much never the ones from wealthy and educated parts of the country. Instead, the accents with misspelled words and awkward inflection are those from other countries, from other social classes, from other ethnicities. If your Maine characters speak normally and your Florida characters have grammatical errors, then you have conveyed what you consider to be correct and normal speech. We know what J.K. Rowling thinks of French-accented English, because itâs dripping off of Fleur Delacourâs every line.
At the bizarre extreme, we see inappropriate application of North U.K. and South U.S.-isms to every uneducated and/or poor character ever to appear in fan fic. When wanting to get across that Steve Rogers is a simple Brooklyn boy, MCU fans have him slip into âmustnâtâ and âwe is.â When conveying that Robin 2.0 is raised poor in Newark, he uses âainâtâ and âyâallâ and âdin.â Never mind that Iron Man is from Manhattan, or that Robin 3.0 is raised wealthy in Newark; neither of them ever gets a written-out accent.
Solution #2: A little word choice can go a long way, and a little research can go even further. Listen carefully to the way people talk â on the bus, in a cafĂŠ, on unscripted YouTube â and write down their exact word choice. âWe goodâ literally means the same thing as âno thank you,â but oneâs a lot more formal than the other. âAinâtâ is a perfectly good synonym for âam not,â but not everyone will use it.
The Obscure Problem: Itâs not even how people talk.
Look at how auto-transcription software messes up speaking styles, and itâs obvious that no one pronounces every spoken sound in every word that comes out of their mouth. Consider how Americans say âyou all right?â; 99% of us actually say something like âyait?â, using tone and head tilt to convey meaning. Politicians speak very formally; friends at bars speak very informally.
An example: Iâm from Baltimore, Maryland. Unless Iâm speaking to an American from Texas, in which case Iâm from âBaltmore, Marlind.â Unless Iâm speaking to an American from Pennsylvania, in which case Iâm from âBalmore, Marlin.â If Iâm speaking to a fellow Marylander, Iâm of course from âBamor.â (If Iâm speaking to a non-American, Iâm of course from âWashington D.C.â) Trying to capture every phoneme of change from moment to moment and setting to setting would be ridiculous; better just to say I inflect more when talking to people from outside my region.
When you write out an accent, you insert yourself, the writer, as an implied listener. You inflict your value judgments and your linguistic ear on the reader, and you take away from the story.
Solution #3: When in doubt, just write the dialogue how you would talk.
