People don’t like Bierce or Twain these days? 
Far as I know, both are still considered greats, and still read (by some at least) with pleasure. Twain especially. Though “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Devil’s Dictionary” are commonly cited.
Not familiar with Bret Hartt.
I just named my parent’s new cat “Finn”. 'Nuff said.
In Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs, there is a fox who has a thick Geordie accent. Each time he spoke, it slowed the story to a crawl for me as I tried to puzzle out what was being said.
Later I found out that my US version had the “lightened” accent for us American readers and the UK publication was even worse.
Heh. Just goes to show. I followed your link and read the whole thing and loved it.
The edition I had had footnotes explaining the dialect, and I definitely needed them.
In general, I think that writing out dialects can be a great tool, if used well, but that most authors can’t use it well, and it comes out horrible. Off the top of my head, I liked it in Twain’s works and in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I can’t think of any other examples.
Richard Adams also did a bit of dialect in Watership Down, some good, some bad. Kehaar’s accent never bothered me, and the one or two lines that Blackavar spoke with an Efrafan accent were very mild.
On the other hand, the human farmer(s) who shoot Hazel? “'e old woild rabbit!” shudder I have to force myself through that section every time I read the book.
The first thing that sprung to mind for me is Steven King’s cringe-inducing dialects, especially black dialects. They physically hurt me to read them.
Just woke up, getting ready to go to work, but I’ll attempt this one when I get out of work… (or on lunch break if no one takes lunch with me). I’ll find out just how much Scots I can stand, I guess. 
It’s Stephen.
Anyway, I could not get through Delores Claiborne. Heavy backwoods Maine dialect made even worse because it was written first person as a monologue.
It just depends on what the accent is and how well it’s done. Huckleberry Finn wasn’t a problem. I’ve read some books where this technique was laborious. It’s probably overused, but not inherently a problem.
Ayuh.
Great idea! I never considered that - I have some long commutes and I’ll check out the library tomorrow to see what they have. Thanks!
I like Girl Genius, but when the Jägers’s speak, I just skip to the next speech bubble.
“Verra nize! Und vot hyu vants ve do next?”
Why keep the contraction “I’m”? Why keep the colloquial “comfy,” instead of “comfortable”? Because those elements are in your dialect?
It depends. I couldn’t finish Huckleberry Finn when I tried it, but I don’t even remember The Moon is a Harsh Mistress having lots of dialect, even though people are using it as an example.
It was the English of a young Asian exchange-student who doesn’t speak much English in the first place.
I don’t like it (that is, I find it hard on the eyes), but in many cases, it’s just unavoidable. Some dialects are sufficiently removed from standard English (whatever that is) that they would almost need translation to render them that way - I’m thinking of Yorkshire or Scottish Highlands - where not only is there an accent, there’s also different grammar and vocab.
Right. Author-invented phonetic renderings of accents are obnoxious, unnecessary, and hard to read. But transcriptions of the dialect, the actual words and structure of someone’s speech–well, that’s sometimes hard to read, too, but it’s much more fundamental to the description of the character and scene.
Qualification to the above: phonetic rendering of an accent may be necessary and effective in cases where characters are themselves having trouble understanding each other for that reason.
I recall Asimov saying once that he had no ear for writing dialects, which is why all his characters may sound alike. He will say that a character “had a heavy Cormellian accent” but never tried to render it phonetically.