Does misspelling words for the sake of bad English improve the immersion or distract the reader?
I am trying to write a character that speaks English poorly. I do not want to grossly misspell words for sounds or use bad grammar. I find those techniques to sound juvenile and the bad grammar is never the correct bad grammar a language would use.
From my bilingual experience, most people that speak poorly will pronounce words as accurate as they can as long as they are new words. On the other hand, when the word sounds similar to the word in their language they will often just say the native word.
I want to pass this on in my writing by including similar words spelled out in the native language.
Will readers correctly pick this up? Will having to figure out these words improve the feeling of the character or just become breaks on the reader's flow?
Some details.
The writing is obviously fiction. The language in question uses a similar enough alphabet to make the words readable.
I think my question is distinct enough from Style when intentionally misspelling? as I am looking to know how it affects the flow of reading, not just a judgement of the reader.
Adding an example of how I am using the technique
“You. You kill my father, and then you stroll in here with your little våpens, You come to see Maud V. You think he is weak, and frail and can be pushed around? No mine babyer. Maud V is going to give you the punishment you deserve."
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4 answers
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A point that has not been touched on in any of the other answers: for some of your readers, English is not their first language. Such readers, if they don't know English very well, would wonder if that word you're using is an English word they don't know, or something you've made up. They would try to look it up in the dictionary, come up with nothing, and remain confused about what you wanted to say.
Phonetic accent is also much harder to read when English is only your second language: it is considerably harder to parse it into the original word.
I remember having particular trouble reading Walter Scott's Waverley. It is heavy with a mix of Scottish dialect words, phonetic accent, and words that are no longer in use. At times I found myself struggling to understand what was being said, and no dictionary could help me. Don't do that to your readers.
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I wouldn't write that way. When I read, I internally hear what the characters are saying, and I certainly cannot hear any misspellings!
If they are using slang or an actual local dialect, "y'all" or "fuhgeddaboutit" might be what I hear. Those are not misspellings, they are an accurate representation of what you hear. But I'd leave out "sound effects" of drawls, slurring, or missing words, nobody in my writing is going to say "butt'n up yer fly" instead of "button up your fly".
Write out the words that people understand regardless of accent or dialect. If what we hear or understand is different enough to actually count as its OWN word, like "y'all" or "fuhgeddaboutit", then I might write that out.
Do not misspell a word if the listener can actually tell what the word is supposed to be. And if your character can't understand it, you should make sure the READER can't figure it out, either.
If you listen to foreign speakers (and I did all the time with foreign students) the problem is not that they are unclear, but that they fail to understand articles and pronouns and other connecting speech, and they often use standard tenses instead of special tenses, much like a six year old. As in, "We are getting the burgers" when asked what they are doing for lunch. Or "we already eated."
Late add: I guess one exception I have seen that seemed alright, was a main character we have seen several times imitating an accent (invented for an alien) for the fun of it. In that case, what he is saying doesn't sound "right" to either him or the person he is conversing with; and the humor they feel would not be apparent without the misspellings. To generalize, the mini-scene demands the distinction in sounds to work; whereas in nearly all other circumstances it doesn't, and a constant reminder of an accent just gets tiresome and increases the reading difficulty. Real people would get used to the accent and hear what was said, both speaker and listener adapt to make their conversation smoother.
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Dialect writing can be extremely difficult to read. The preferred technique today seem to be to do just a very small hint of it. The best way to portray the background and intelligence of a person is through the words they choose and the ideas they express.
People from different areas use different words. If you want to portray US south, you could throw in a "y'all" now and then.
But more important is what they say, not how they say it. Stupid people say stupid things. If you want your character seem stupid, have them say and do stupid things.
The screen has other techniques. Actor can act the dialect and the halting speech. It is hard for novelists to reproduce this kind of thing effectively. Don't fall into the trap of trying to act our your characters through words. Instead, make them known through their actions and the actions of others towards them.
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It will probably distract quite a few people
I would certainly be distracted by this and search for the words the author really meant, probably without even realizing that this is intentional.
Most authors will use the grossly misspelled words and similar techniques to show the reader that it's intentional. This also emphasizes the problems with the language.
Many people will not even catch every single mini-mistake you place in your text and they might even only realize it after being through half the book. Humans normally don't read every single letter of every single word. We are used to reading fluently and our brain will often just correct minor mistakes if we are not specifically searching for them. Espeially when doing some light reading your readers will probably not dedicate so much attention to everything and will skip over quite a few small typos.
But those that realize will be distracted by it. They will search for the right word because they think that the author just had a typo or that they are misinterpreting the meaning of the used word. And then they find the next typo and they have to re-read the sentence with the correct word in mind.
You might want to mix the two versions if you are bent on using this - you could for example start with obvious mistakes and let your characters point them out, but then switch to another character and let someone point out to the reader that this person "is quite good and only makes minor mistakes". This way everyone will get it and people won't be so distracted, because someone told them "he typically confuses he and she" or whatever you want to use in your text.
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