New answers tagged language
2
Placing foreign languages phrases in italics is a well established convention that extends outside the bounds of fiction. It is always vastly preferable to stick with established conventions since people are much more apt to recognize them than anything you invent for yourself. Still, I would recommend that you explain what is happening the first time you ...
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Maybe enclose the words in some other punctuation?
Brackets:
"Wow! You [finally listened to] my stinking advice!"
Curly Brackets:
"Wow! You {finally listened to} my stinking advice!"
Guillemets:
"Wow! You «finally listened to» my stinking advice!"
Experiment with colons, asterisks, et al.
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You could have scenes with a family next door or in the next apartment/flat that just moved in from the USA or Canada. Possibly the protagonist could often have to stop and mentally translate their American phrases into British phrases. And so the readers would learn what those British phrases mean at that time, before the British characters use them.
Or ...
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By far the most successful young-adult novels in history, Harry Potter, use British spellings, terminology, idioms, and slang—and they did nothing to stop those novels from being more successful than any other. References to prefects and so on, slang like “snogging” etc., caused no problems. For that matter, few Americans had ever even heard the name “...
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Use English English except where doing so would cause confusion, in which case use neutral words. If you can't do that, maybe clarify with extra information, (e.g. for "Year 8", you could also add in the age of the character, which makes it clear what grade that year represents) or if you absolutely have to, a footnote or have the narrator explain or ...
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If you're writing for an American audience, with an American publisher, then use an American dialect for your narration.
But... your character is living in England. Whether she's British or an immigrant or a visitor, she's going to be exposed to the local dialect. She will use local terms when appropriate. If she's in Year 8 in school, she'll say that. ...
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The trope you're looking for is referred to as phonetic accent, or Funetik Aksent. That is, spelling out words as they are spoken by a particular character, rather than they way they should be written.
This is a trope you should be very wary of using. It makes the text significantly harder to read. For several reasons:
Normally, we do not read a word ...
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Show it.
Using a different spelling is akin to telling: you could similarly just make a recording and ship it with your story. It does not make much sense, right?
You could instead show it. Write down the dialogue in proper English, but show what the words sound like, show the face that the character makes in producing the different sounds, and show the ...
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Many writers have grappled with this particular problem. Some make use of it.
Colloquial speech and pronunciation in dialog is a tricky thing--too much of alternative pronunciation and it gets hard to read. Readers don't like having to have to translate. The modern way is to pick a few of these and stick with them.
But in older books, like Mark Twain in ...
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As far as I know, there is no official rules on how to do this. Authors have resorted to various means to convey this, and we actually do it in common texting more than anywhere else. A good example of that is the difference between "Hey" and "Heyyyyy" where the later is generally understood to be held out and almost more cheerful the more it is lengthened.
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