Joy wrote, re rendered dialect:
>
> Copyeditors discuss this sometimes. The consensus
usually is the less of
it,
> the better because (1) it's hard on the reader and
(2) it tends to have a
> demeaning effect on the speaker. Writers mostly
don't phonetically spell
out
> what Lord High Muckety-Muck says; the marginalized,
the poor, the
> uneducated, the foreign, and various other outsiders
get the treatment.
It's
> an easy way for the author to signal disdain for the
speaker.
My first and only crime short story came out in Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1980. It was set in a cowboy
amusement park in Oklahoma, and I wrote it with dialect, but
no more pervasive than the occasional "ya" (for
"you"), "ya'll" (for "you all"), a frequent omission of the
"g" from "-ing" words, and some deliberately bad grammar to
attempt capture of the vernacular of the people I wrote
about. AHMM's copy editor fixed it all up so that it read
less like Jesse James and more like Henry James. We are not
amused.
Jim Beaver
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