If you want to start a piece of direct speech with a truncated word like "'ere" instead of "Here", do you capitalise the 'e'??? Can't get it to look right.

Pete

Hi Pete,

As the apostrophe replaces the letter that would normally be capitalised in this instance, I'd have thought the 'e' would be lower case. I can't find confirmation of this in any of my reference books, but that's what I'd do. You're right, capitalising it looks icky.

Myrtle

Myrtle

Thanks. Looks odd either way, especially a speech mark followed by and apostrophe... Maybe best avoided anyway. Just start the sentence with a different word

Pete

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an apostrophe

Accents are always awkward - those thirties detective stories are unreadable (not to say condescending) with their phonetic spellings. If you can establish the speaker's dialect with his/her vocabulary and syntax, you should be able to write 'Here' and have the reader hear the accent mentally as ''ere'.

Emma

Emma

I agree the real work is done with rhythm and syntax. But Walsh writes something akin to a phonetic rendering of dialect and it works well there. Rankin uses occasional choice bits of vocab to keep you on track, and I like that too. The London accent's difficult. If it's done badly, it does sound like a RADA actor doing 'cockerney', but it's challenging to try and do it well. The 'h' sound just doesn't exist in this character's world, so maybe it's actually condescending to write it in... maybe it's a question of dropping the apostrophe... maybe maybe maybe... well, I can only experiment, I'd like to find a way of rendering it Walsh-like, but that's a tall order.

I live as an incomer and an outsider in a pretty extraordinary part of London -we had a body dumped at the end of our road yesterday (far from an isolated incident)- and since joining up with WW and starting to try and write, I've been finding the world outside me door, sorry, my door, more and more interesting, it's the oddest change in myself, I'm just looking at stuff/listening to stuff like it's in focus for the first time, and of course it's hard to avoid condescending, as you rightly point out. For now I'm just aiming at some kind of reportage/accuracy without judgement.

Thanks, as ever, for your expertise and help.

Pete

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Didn't really get to my thought in that last para, which is that the accent here is so extreme, expresses so much about life here, it feels like it needs something extra to get it over. Does that make sense? Admittedly the dropped 'h' might not be the answer!!

Yes, there are people who do it well, but it isn't easy. Maybe we're just hyper-sensitive to the accents that were most imitated in older books.

Rankin uses occasional choice bits of vocab to keep you on track

I think that's the trick - but so hard to do! Just enough to get you to read it right, not so much that it becomes harder work than you can be bothered.

It works when you've got someone with a French accent, or whatever, too.

Emma

Pete,

The writing of an accent will fail if you try to imitate actual speech. This is akin to the need to differentiate between how people actually speak and the dialogue writers use.

Most good writers recognise this and this skill becomes an involuntary part of the writers' craft. So, when they write dialogue, it is read as if it is exactly 'right'. However written dialogue will not include the 'ums, ers and ahs', it will lack the changes of volume, the pauses, the suddening quickening of pace and the many other nuances that turn speech into communication.

With any dialect or accent, the written words that make the sounds you want, have to be used quite sparingly. If you wish to start with the word 'ere' then it can look ugly so why not change this or start with 'Look 'ere' - quite a favourite cockney expression.

Len

Len

Thanks that's a good solution. I have to say my post was spurred by a thing I'm doing which is using a cod cockney accent, actually a professor telling a story about an encounter he had with a London crim, and so there's meant to be some humour in how the accent's rendered -i.e. containing the condescension Emma mentions, so I'm kind of going for the cliche'd thing, which is why your suggestion suits.

You're right also in that analysis of accent in writing, and I understand that a strong accent can be wearing for the reader if taken too far. But there's something I want to capture that's hard to describe -this is in writing about where I live I mean- and it needs something new, noticeable. There's a flat, harsh, hard thing, and I want to get it. I had a go in a flash last week, The Idiot, and it's set me wanting to take it further.

Thanks Len

Pete