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You should never write in the tone of ordinary speech. Ordinary speech is unreadable. It is repetitive, broken, trivial, and largely mindless. Dialogue is not speech. Dialogue should be crisp, rele...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:56Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35512 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T07:53:43Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35512 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T07:53:43Z (about 5 years ago)
You should never write in the tone of ordinary speech. Ordinary speech is unreadable. It is repetitive, broken, trivial, and largely mindless. Dialogue is not speech. Dialogue should be crisp, relevant, coherent, readable, and should move the story along. As such, dialogue is always to a greater or lesser extend stylized. In many cases writers will stylize the speech of different characters in different ways in order to provide a clear differentiation of the speakers for the reader. (Does Sam talk like Gandalf, or Gollum like Gimli?) Whether "for" as a conjunction is truly obsolete is debatable. Certainly "because" is the lazy alternative today, but for is by no means archaic. You could well use the choice of for rather then because to stylize on character's speech. (And "'cus", "on account of", "since", and "reason being" for other characters. Of such trivial devices, sometimes, are distinctive voices made.)
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-04-25T15:09:07Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 0