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By James N. Powell | Professional Editor | Editing-Writing.com

When editing a novel or short story for grammar, plot, dialog, pacing, character development, and all the rest, it’s also important to note when characters sound the same—when each speaks the same dialect, with the same accent, grammar, and pronunciation and uses the same thought patterns, phrases, and diction.

It would be as if everywhere you travel in the world—sweatshops in Bangladesh, ghettos of inner-city Chicago, Mexican weddings in San Antonio, yak-castrating rodeos in Mongolia, high tea in Buddhist nunneries of Shri Lanka—everyone speaks Valleyspeak, to wit:

• Like – inserted, for emphasis, in phrases. “That dude is, like, totally awesome!”

• Whatever! – short for “Whatever you say”; sarcastic comeback.

• Totally – “I agree” or “completely.”

• Fer shur! – “For sure!”

Such writing is, for dead sure, the fastest way to lull your readers into a state of abysmal and endless sleep. An astute editor, however, can help you locate and weed out such monotony and will probably suggest you set your manuscript aside for a spell and sit yourself down and reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After all, Huck Finn became the first really American novel by being the first to effectively flaunt the richness of American dialects—a whole passel of ‘em. And Twain didn’t just pussyfoot around but plunged right in with Huck’s first sentence: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.”

If you analyze that sentence carefully, you’ll notice it takes only one puny little two-syllable word to really hit you over the head: without—which if corrected by a grammar Nazi, would be replaced by unless. Yet this one morsel of backwoods diction, when spiced up with the sentence’s don’t and ain’t, is enough to let you know that Huck hasn’t had a whole damn lot of schooling.

Many characters in Twain’s novel speak in dialects different from Huck’s, using words such as owdacious (audacious), shore (sure), that-air (that there), jist (just), and so on. Huck’s pal Jim doesn’t sound a bit like Huck, and the stiffly starched Widow Douglas doesn’t talk anything like Huck or Jim. In fact, the uniqueness of each personality rings true to each character’s way of talking.

Take Pap (Huck’s dad), for instance. Although Huck and Pap speak the same dialect, Huck’s been hanging around with the likes of Tom Sawyer and other educated folk, and so inflects the dialect in a way that is just a hair more civilized. Pap, in comparison, comes off as he is: a crude backwoods hick. Whereas Huck says get, Pap will say git; when Huck says you want, Pap will say you wants. Those miniscule differences say worlds about Pap. In fact, embittered Pap would use the word highfalutin to describe Huck’s speech, not only because of where Pap was born, but because of his need to put down any level of society above his own wretched state.

To distinguish between Huck’s and the slave Jim’s speech, Twain often uses eye dialect—dialect that looks different. For instance, whereas Huck says of, Jim says uv; whereas Huck says was, Jim says wuz. In addition, Jim uses phrases and constructions that Huck never mouths—such as the done-perfect construction, as in she done broke loose, or such as the exclamations  dad blamedest, dad fetch him, and ding-busted.

Although the use of eye dialect helps paint Jim as a different personality than Huck, it must be added that in recent decades Twain’s depiction of Jim’s speech has taken a lot of heat. Many readers might ask because of sounds the same as uv and was the same as wuz—what exactly is Twain trying to get across? That Jim has had even less schooling than Huck? That he couldn’t spell correctly? Thus, dialog written in thick eye dialect can become not only difficult to read, but might tax the reader’s patience and may even inspire accusations of political incorrectness. Although this great American novel is not exactly banned, many educational institutions will not teach Huckleberry Finn.

In the end, what counts as dialog that is too heavy for sustained reading boils down to a matter of individual taste. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character Pheoby says, “Ah sho hope you ain’t lak uh possum—de older you gits, de less sens yuh got.” Some readers admire such exact phonetic depiction of dialect and are willing to slog through hundreds of pages of it because of its authenticiy, whereas others will tire of it quickly.

Of course you have to write what you know. You probably won’t be able to write convincing 19^th century backwoods dialog. But maybe one of your characters—say a Shri-Lankan Buddhist nun—could very well be infected with elements of Valleyspeak, although she may never have heard of Moon Unit Zappa (Frank Zappa’s daughter), who made that way of speaking popular worldwide with her hit single “Valley Girls.” Another of your characters might speak a mix of Valleyspeak and Southern California surfer slang: “Dude, that wave was, like, totally tubular.”

Whatever dialect your characters speak, an experienced editor will probably not write dialect for you, but can point out where characters sound too much the same. If you pay attention to the dialects of those around you, you can start writing characters who speak in ways that ring true to their personalities. Then an editor can indicate where a character’s dialect is too thick—or too thin.  After all, even though readers crave variations in dialect that help differentiate characters, reading a constant stream of heavy dialect becomes tedious. An editor can help you achieve balance: telling you where you have written in too much dialect, making it the main course instead of the seasoning.

So where do you go to find out about writing dialect? The web is teeming with sites, and because most readers are looking for seasoning rather than a main course, you might, for instance, write a story about a vapid teenage shopping princess and plug in a few lexical items from the lyrics of the song “Valley Girl”:

So like I go into this like salon place, y’know
And I wanted like to get my toenails done
And the lady like goes, oh my God, your toenails
Are like so grody!
It was like really embarassing
She’s like Oh My God, like bag those toenails

I’m like shur…
She goes, uh, I don’t know if I can handle this, y’know.
I was like really embarassed.

Or suppose you are writing redneck dialect. You will find many sites with redneck expressions such as a cunt hair short and a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.

Twain’s boyhood was spent in the river town of Hannibal Missouri, an area teeming with cantankerous old cusses barking out sayings such as well dog my cats or happy as a coon in a cornfield with the dogs all tied.

The following are two of my favorite American dialect sites:

http://missourifolkloresociety.truman.edu/expressions.html

http://www.scrollseek.com/wordplay/sayingslist.html

If you’ve got a hankerin’ for cowpoke dialect, then head on over to this site:

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-slang.html

Similarly, you can find splendid exemplars of almost any dialect by using the following search terms—dialect, sayings, expressions, phrases, slang, lingo, and lexicon or dictionary—and that’s fer shur.