The Writing Life: Avoiding The Dangers of Dialect in Your Dialogue

If you write fiction, short stories or novels, it is likely that you will have a character in your stories that would be rendered more realistically if his or her dialogue was in some regional dialect.  While this can add depth and color to your story, it can also be dangerous if not handled correctly; attempts at dialect that are overdone to the point of parody can turn readers off to your writing one of quicker than misspellings or typos. 

This does not mean you should never try to do dialect in your dialogue; but a caution that you should be aware of the potential dangers.  Having your English character saying ‘crikey!’ from time to time can give your story that extra little bump of credibility.  The key here is ‘from time to time.’  Dialect, unless what you’re striving for is comedy, shouldn’t be overdone. 

The Danger of Dialect Overdone

Here’s an example of use of dialect that almost failed in its intended objective.  In a short story I wrote, Rural Free Delivery, the story of a city boy from Detroit running away from a murderous loan shark who goes to hide with his relatives on a farm in rural east Texas.  In an effort to highlight the cultural clash between the people from these two disparate worlds, I had the rural relatives speaking more or less in the patois that I recall hearing growing up in east Texas in the 1940s and 1950s.  I had pretty much established my main character, Louis Dumkowski, as a street smart white kid who tried to talk ‘black,’ and through the use of occasional slang terms when he spoke, his voice was instantly recognizable.  In portraying his country kin, unfortunately, I overdid it.  I know I got the terms, cadence, and even the pronunciation right; but in the ears of some readers, I came off as insulting, because I did it in almost every line of dialogue they uttered.  One reader let me know right away that, unless my intent was caricature, I’d offended her by my patronizing treatment of these solid southern country folk, and upon re-reading what I’d written, I had to agree.

Less is Better – Let the Reader Fill in the Blanks

My intent had in fact been comedy, but I could see, reading the story weeks after I’d finished it, that it was more cruel than funny.  I could have achieved the same effect with an occasional phrase of dialect.  From that one offended reader, I learned a great lesson.  Less is often more. 

Establish your character’s cultural or social background in the first few lines of dialogue, but with as little as possible; and from that point, only revert to dialect when necessary to achieve a specific effect, or to occasionally remind readers.  Otherwise, use Standard English to render dialogue.  If you’ve done a proper job of establishing your character’s identity early on, the reader will supply the appropriate sounds.

Writing dialogue in dialect, unless you’re Mark Twain – and even he overdid it in some of his tales – can be dangerous if you overdo it.  Like Japanese gardens, where minimalism is the key, allowing the viewer to fill in the blank spaces, dialect should be used sparingly, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the sounds.