Comment by dylan604
10 days ago
I had similar thoughts when reading Huck Finn. It's not just phonetically spelled, it's much different. Almost like Twain came up with a list of words, and then had a bunch of 2nd graders tell him the spelling of words they had seen. I guess at some point, you just get good at bad spelling?
Writing in the vernacular, I believe it's called. I do something like that if I'm texting.
The book "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks uses something like this for one of its characters to quite good effect.
Except it forces me to slow down to "decypher" the text and makes the reading labored. I understand the point as it is part of the character, but it is easier to understand someone speaking in that vernacular vs reading the forced misspellings. I definitely don't want to get to the point of being good at reading it though. I wonder if this is how second grade teachers feel reading the class' schoolwork?
That's true. I'm sure Twain and Banks were aware of this, though. Apparently they considered the immersion to be worth a little extra work on the part of the reader. Whether the reader agrees is a different story.
I try to limit my use of it to just enough for my accent and way of talking to bleed through. I don't go for full-on phonetics, but I'm often "droppin' my g's and usin' lotsa regional sayin's." It probably helps that the people I text have the same accent I do, though.