#6 Some thoughts about dialogue . . . (Brought to you this week by Tootsie, who is a fan of spoken interrogative dialogue, i.e. "Who's a good girl?" "Time to eat?" "Go for a walk?")
Word’s corrective proclivities are realistic dialogue’s enemy. Word wants me to use complete sentences, proper grammar and correct spelling, but people, even highly educated people not to mention the rest of us, do not speak thus. We utter incomplete thoughts and insist on saying ain’t, we elide, employ slang, misuse infinitives and gerunds, use the wrong tense, and hurl expletives. We are incorrigibly incorrect in spoken communication. I turn edit and spellcheck off when writing dialogue and so should you. I often use my phone’s recording app to read aloud what I’ve written. Both the act of reading out loud and subsequently listening to the result are invaluable means of measuring whether your dialogue sounds realistic. Unlike silently reading your words on the page, aloud, you can hear immediately when a passage sounds off. In writing dialogue, the adverb is never your friend. If you have to tell your reader that your character is speaking “ruefully,” “sarcastically,” “sadly,” “ironically,” etc. (apropos of nothing, I can’t listen to Alanis Morissette’s song, “Isn’t It Ironic?” without greeting each of her examples with a “Sorry, no, it’s not!), then your dialogue is not doing its job. On the other hand, all rules are made to be broken. The tricky part is knowing that it is a rule and that you are breaking it.
4 Comments
Cathryn Essinger
2/8/2022 10:18:18 am
True! You can break any rule that you understand that you are breaking, but please of please, tell me what to do about “you and I” used incorrectly, especially when the I is used to continue a rhyme! (I blame The Doors for continuing this problem since my youth.)
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Tina
2/8/2022 12:57:22 pm
Such good advice!!!
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Mary J White
2/8/2022 12:16:46 pm
I think people think that "you and I" always sounds more refined. If they'd only omit the "you" and see how it sounds without it, all would be made clear. Depending on the character, sometimes I'll use it incorrectly too in dialogue, but it clangs like an old dinner bell in my ear.
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2/14/2022 09:56:14 pm
This is such a relatable post. I find that Word (and the rest of the Office products) treat everything I write as if it's a business email to someone I don't know very well. In addition to flagging casual grammar choices, it keeps urging me not to equivocate. Sometimes, however, I want to arrive at my point indirectly.
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