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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/285
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Agreed that it all depends on who the narrator's supposed to be, and, frankly, what tone you're trying to bring across to the reader.

Two of my favorite opening paragraphs of all time:

> When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.
> 
> H.P. Lovecraft, ["Azathoth"](http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/athoth.htm)

Contrast with... this:

> Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time, though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
> 
> Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Perhaps not a lot of _slang_ in either, but talk about different tones. Lovecraft famously wrote of stuffy, deliberate intellect clashing with cosmic horror, and his narration is somewhere between sonnet and scientific-journal entry.

Palahniuk, meanwhile, reads like a wild-eyed young man, slightly out-of-breath, who's just flung an arm around your shoulder and started telling you a story.

Think about how you want your story to _sound_ - like the confession of a learned man, or like the antics your buddy related to you at the bar, and let that guide the way your narrator _speaks_. And the emphasis on sound and speech brings us to a classic tip: **read your narration out loud.** Nothing else will make the awkward bits quite so obvious quite so quickly.

Original score: 6