F’rinstance in the Pig Parts thread “cracklins” came up*. The word is “cracklings”, but if I used an apostrophe to show the elision it would be “cracklin’s” which looks exactly like it would be a possession of a single cracklin’. Just curious if there are editors guides for dialect in written form. The word “cracklins” is very well known are always written that way that I’ve seen, even on commercial products. But what about similar words less familiar to readers?
*If you are unaware cracklings are fried pieces of pork belly skin.
As many professional writers and editors here have pointed out, “rules” of this nature are generally styles, either established by the publisher, or perhaps in the case of a novel, created specifically for the book by the author in cooperation with the editor.
Are you asking out of general interest, or are you working on something that might need this kind of guidance?
I’ll tell ya wut, I jus’ write an spell any dang way I wanna do it, an if anybody questions it, I jus’ bluff and make the claim that a certain reference book sez I’m right. Now, of course I share the same last name wit’ dat reference book, so I’m really saying I’m right cuz I told ya so!
All youse has gots ta do is change yer last name to Roget, Webster, Thorndike-Barnhart, Harvard Style Guide, or wutnot, an you can get away with the same thing!
Quite a few writers from a century or more ago did it, many of them not nearly as skillfully or readably as Twain.
All the modern writing advice I’ve seen says to use this sort of thing sparingly: enough to give a sense of how the person talks, but not attempting to phonetically reproduce exactly how they say everything.
Yes, it’s hard to do, and hard to do consistently, and can become either tiresome or confusing for readers, which can lead many to give up. Twain was definitely the master, but I recently re-read Huckleberry Finn, and found many passages challenging or opaque.
A trick that Rex Stout used (more than once, IIRC) was to have narrator Archie Goodwin start out transcribing a character’s dialect as it sounded, to give a flavor of the person’s accent, but then he would say something like, “Just imagine everything else he said sounded like that.” All the rest of the dialog would be in standard English.
That technique spares both the writer and reader quite a bit of trouble.
I’ve found that in almost all cases, the only “dialects” that are ever transcribed this way are lower and working-class accents. Rich people always speak with proper spelling.
Wasn’t the conceit behind Huckleberry Finn that Huck himself wrote down what we’re reading - hence all the “creative” spelling? (Including spellings like “ejukayshun,” which are more akin to eye dialect.)
It bugged the crap out of me throughout Gone With The Wind that all the slaves said “hospiddle” for “hospital,” every time. Because, you know, American white people definitely give the word that distinctive “t” sound. (Actually they/we say “hospiddle” too, exactly like that.)
This is so true. I’ve read hundreds of mysteries from the so-called “Golden Age.” I can’t remember a single example of a servant, British or American, not being depicted as speaking in some sort of dialect.
I’m now intensely curious whether some academic have ever in history done a study to see whether those dialects followed the same general principles.
I’ve looked at tons of stuff about writing and never seen anything close to rules for dialects. Except: don’t do them.
The Associated Press stylebook strenuously warns of using dialect even in a direct quote. “Quoting dialect, unless used carefully, implies substandard or illiterate usage.”
As for how to write dialect, the stylebook says to spell everything phonetically and use apostrophes to indicate missing letters or sounds.
Old newspaper comics did it heavily, too. It is so tedious, for instance, trying to read through a Pogo collection. Those “accents” just become more grating the more you read.
Interesting that standard spelling for creoles (like Haitian) don’t hew to the spelling of the parent language (in that case, French) but instead render the sounds of the derived language. Where to draw the line between something like Creole or Pidgin and a dialect is left as an exercise to the tenured faculty.
