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Character Dialogue


TNTOS

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Whenever I write the dialogue of characters in my stories, I don't usually worry about grammar. I mean, yeah, most of them speak pretty good and are understandable to the average reader, but if I happen to see a grammar mistake I usually overlook it because in my opinion, character dialogue doesn't necessarily have to have perfect grammar, since few people in real life speak perfect grammar and since good fiction emulates real life, I let my characters speak in bad grammar sometimes, if necessary.

 

Of course, I understand the difference between real life and fiction. In fiction, you want to be clear, precise, and you can achieve that through editing and revising. You can't usually do that in real life unless you're preparing a speech, so it makes sense that a lot of people would only speak average level grammar than perfect grammar. Most of the time, when my characters speak bad grammar, it is sort of a mistake, but I rarely change it unless it doesn't make sense and would confuse the reader.

 

So whenever I review fanfiction, unless it is totally incomprehensible and I can't figure out what they're saying, I rarely bother to critique the grammar in character dialogue (although if I see very bad grammar in a paragraph outside of dialogue I will point it out and tell you what was wrong with it and how to improve it).

 

Some people may disagree with me, of course, and they have every right to do that. But I find that this is a pretty subjective idea and one that people rarely discuss unless it is about the different words and speech patterns that characters and people use when having speaking sometimes.

 

-TNTOS-

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I agree. With character dialogue I actually like it loose--people don't talk perfectly. It's comfortable to see slurs, stuttering, run on sentences, etc. But you don't want to get too mixed up and just confuse people, just like you said. Good mindset there. I was studying this with a writing book I have, it's very informative.

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