I started reading a book recently, by a well known female author who I haven't read before. Her books are often set around the late 1800s early 1900s.

I have been ploughing through it, and last night I almost threw the thing across the room.

The story is fine, but the dialogue is bloody awful!

It is so wearing and annoying. Here is one of the sentences -

"Gerrit out, what's up with yez. Iffen yer fell inter bed wi' 'im, 'ow many more 'ave there bin? I've cum by the likes of youse before."

and another one -

"I'm goin round ter see that feller an' tell 'im iffen 'e takes any more bets for meladdo I'll be beltin' 'im hard iffen yer get me meanin'."

Grrr, it has been driving me mad and I just can't read any more.

Now, going back to the 'rules' of writing, I was always under the assumption that with dialogue, you avoid dialect. That if you have people talking with broad accents, it will annoy the reader who may not know many of the regional slang words and they may give up and read something more accessible - as I have. I believe that it is far better to say that the character spoke in, say, a Geordie accent, and let the reader use their imagination.

This is one book I certainly won't be finishing.


Katerina

or maybe use the odd word, here and there, but that's gobbledegook. I got something similar in a novel, where it was a strong Glaswegian accent, and for some reason it worked quite well. It was difficult at first, but because it was narrative, not dialogue, you had a solid page - or several solid pages - of it, and after a while it began to scan like normal text. Weird.

On the plus side, the chunks of this narrative were rather small and you could see that the section was nearing its end.

Yes, I find that kind of thing maddening too. That dialogue makes reasonable sense if you read it aloud, so I think it's not necessarily the dialect (i.e. vocabulary and syntax and grammar) so much as the non-standard spelling that's trying to evoke the accent, that causes the problem.

If that sentence had been written with standard spelling, but keeping the actually different dialect words, like this, say,

'Get it out! What's up with you? Iff'n you fell into bed with him, how many more have there been? I've come by the likes of youse before.'

I think you'd still read it as broad Geordie, but easily, without stumbling.

I'm reading 15th century letters at the moment. They're a real struggle in the original spelling, but with that modernised, it's no harder than reading Shakespeare.

Emma

Is this a contemporary author? It seems like it used to be the fashion to spell out regional accents, but I haven't seen many authors do it recently - probably because, like this, it sounds so silly!

And yes - it does make sense if you read it out loud - which doesn't really help if you like to read on the train in the mornings!

Yes, I think it's old-fashioned - just look at all those 30s novels trying to write Cockney. It's also condescening to write things out phonetically for regional accents, but not for received pronunciation. RP isn't pronounced how it's written either, after all: RP says 'luv' just as much as Cockney does, for example. I haven't read Londonstani, but I know people - serious readers, recognising their kind of book, - who yet found it so hard to understand they gave up.

Emma