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-> Hobbies, Crafts, and Collections
-> The Imamother Writing Club
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amother
OP
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 Mon, Aug 29 2022, 9:26 am
I have a meeting with a writing expert and did not manage to get through one of the suggested books, because a lot of the dialogue was in this southern/slang that’s hard for me to read.
Is there a professional term for this kind of writing?
And I don’t want to sound racist, but it’s so hard for me to read and understand this kind of dialogue; how can I best explain this without sounding like a white privileged suburban person that I am? Thanks.
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amother
Acacia
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 9:28 am
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I would I just say I had a hard time with the dialect and it didn’t work well for me. No need to get super specific.
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amother
Poinsettia
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 9:29 am
It's just dialect, that's all.
And it isn't necessarily connected to race or even being urban. White southerners can have a pretty heavy dialect, too. Think Appalachian or Deep South.
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imafriend
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 9:40 am
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The literary term is diction. There are 8 types of diction and one of them is slang.
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ora_43
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 11:26 am
It's not racist. Books that write accents into the text are annoying as heck.
Like, some southerners pronounce "I said" as "ah saed" and "my pet" as more like "mah peht." But you don't actually write mah peht, that's stupid, they are saying the words "my pet" spelled exactly the way northerners do.
If anything it's a bit... not racist, exactly, but, I guess, northeastern-normative?  - to write as if regional accents have to be expressed with different combinations of letters. Instead of being another perfectly legitimate way to vocalize the same letters.
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ora_43
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 11:30 am
FTR that's not my answer for "how can I best explain this."
What's the role of this other person? They are helping you with writing? If so I'd just say something like, "I don't really like it when authors use unique spellings to express regional accents, I find it hard to follow."
Unless they're trying to convince you to write that way, too, that should do it. (If they are - get a different writing expert. But I'm guessing they chose that book for some other reason, like plot or dialogue, not specifically as a guidebook for doing accents.)
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amother
Daphne
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 12:22 pm
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You're mixing up slang and dialects. I don't think you're referring to slang. I think you're referring to what ora called regional dialects, or accents. It seems you're bothered when they're expressed by writing them out with different letters according to their pronunciation. Of course I can't be sure what you're referring to. Look up definitions for slang, dialect, regional accent, and see which term best describes what you're talking about.
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amother
Lightgray
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 4:00 pm
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It's definitely dialect. Basically the author has written phonetically out the words as the character would have said them instead of spelling the words correctly. I don't mind this here and there as it adds character, but I would also find it hard to read a book where it was all written phonetically.
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chanatron1000
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 4:03 pm
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When books are written in an accent, it's based on how the author would pronounce it, which doesn't necessarily match the reader's pronunciation. The reader has to know how the author would pronounce the words to understand how it's intended.
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amother
Hawthorn
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Mon, Aug 29 2022, 4:05 pm
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