— Learning to Write XXX

In casual conversation all speakers slur vowels, drop final consanants and take short-cuts through syntax. Don’t tell me this only occurs with people on the lower rungs of the social scale. If you believe that, you haven’t learned to listen yet.

In the latest post in this series I suggested that speech transferred to the page needs trimming. It also, however, needs to be corrected by adding those final g’s and missing t’s which everyone neglects.

Even when you wish to write dialect you will find that reproduction is inadequate. What a reader will tolerate is the idea that the speaker is using dialect, but he won’t appreciate having to struggle with the reality of unintelligible words. You can get away with inversion and the occasional oddity of phrase. But don’t try to push it too much further. You will achieve your effect by suggestion of difference rather than by presentation of it.

We all speak dialect. Even, and sometimes especially, those of us who don’t think we do. Many people try to hide it, but there are truly few people who are free of racial or geographical speech marks.

For the writer it is a matter of judgement how many or how few special marks his characters are given to differentiate them from each other. Each mark is paid for by extra effort on the part of the reader.

And after the manner of the transcripted speech has delineated character, race, nationality, social standing or whatever else it has to do, it also must help to advance the narrative.

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— Learning to Write XXVIII

I’ve managed to avoid talking about dialogue in this series up to now, but eventually it has to be dealt with. I don’t think it’s possible to deal with it adequately in one post. So what I have to say will be supplemented later by a couple of additional posts.
It is a complicated subject because [...]