blogs_blog_1834

If it's done well and adds to the story, it's definitely a plus. After all, experiment with form is a large part of effective writing. Faulkner, Twain, and Joyce all did this well.

 

However, if you're just slapping some semi-Cockney or semi-Southern spellings into the dialogue then it's pointless. An accent shouldn't just be used to add quaint variety.

Uh... I prefer to leave it to the imagination... In other words, if the accent holds actual importance to the plot or a certain character (Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for example, while I found it annoying, I understood the accented words were switched around to capture the feel of the time era and how different the world was on a fundamental level from life today. That's just my opinion, though).

 

If it's really not that important to anything, then I'd leave it to other character observation or gentle nudges. I wouldn't make it too tedious to read.

Yeah if you can do it well, I'm all for it and don't mind the occasional strong accent

It depends. If it's only spelled phonetically for certain short sections, there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't have complicated phonetic spelling go on for the whole story a la Charles Chesnutt. It gets really hard to read really fast.

Echoing Vorahk1Panrahk2, it depends. I don't think it should be used all the time -- for one it's very hard to do that well, and for two that might sometimes just come across as trying too hard. But if it fits the character, and it's done right, then by all means. I'm not the biggest fan of Huckleberry Finn, but one of the things that I enjoyed about it was the accent of Jim. It was slightly annoying, sure, but that's kinda the point -- and it was great. Extremely well done, definitely.

 

But the key is to also make sure that it's still legible. Sometimes accents can be so hard to decipher that it ends up either slowing down the reading a lot, or just makes it unable to understand what they're saying -- and that's obviously not a good thing.

 

If your character is native to some place that has a distinct accent, and it can be done well, then by all means go for it. Just don't overdue it, as with everything (and I agree with BioGio; make sure it's not pointless, obviously).