need editor to check Boston accent

[CAP811]

I've written a story set in Boston; one of the minor characters is a bartender. I've tried to give him a 'Boston accent' just for atmosphere and to delineate his character. Another, more important character, is an African-American woman. I'd like an editor to read that part of the story and give me some feedback on a)whether or not I got the acccents right, and b) whether or not the dialects add to the realism or are just a distraction.
Most readers seem to prefer the King's English with all characters, regardless of who they are, but somehow I can hear the dialog better in my mind when the written word correlates with how a particular person would likely speak.
Anyone willing to read this?

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

I've written a story set in Boston; one of the minor characters is a bartender. I've tried to give him a 'Boston accent' just for atmosphere and to delineate his character. Another, more important character, is an African-American woman. I'd like an editor to read that part of the story and give me some feedback on a)whether or not I got the acccents right, ... Anyone willing to read this?

Sorry, I am not qualified to help with either of those.

... I'd like an editor to ... give me some feedback on ... b) whether or not the dialects add to the realism or are just a distraction.

It can help if it is done well, but it is easy to descend into parody where all Irish speakers say "begorrah", all Welsh speakers say "look you", all Scottish speakers say "Och aye", and all Jewish speakers say "Oi veh".

Done properly, however, local usages such as "giving out" for "complaining" as in ... "My wife's giving out about me going to the football." ... certainly places the speaker in contemporary Ireland, and probably somewhere near Dublin, but remains comprehensible to someone who is not familiar with that usage. Similarly if a blue collar resident of the UK East Midlands meets another he will say "Ay up, where yo off?"

(Of course, if someone says "I say, that's just not fair" all the time you just know that he is an English rugby supporter.)

The difficulty arises when the reader does not know, and will not recognise, the accent concerned and the words are twisted to be phonetic spelling which takes time to decipher. That interrupts the flow of reading and then the cursor is liable to hover near the [BACK] button.

"Y'orl ketch ma driiif?"

 

[cloudy]

I've written a story set in Boston; one of the minor characters is a bartender. I've tried to give him a 'Boston accent' just for atmosphere and to delineate his character. Another, more important character, is an African-American woman. I'd like an editor to read that part of the story and give me some feedback on a)whether or not I got the acccents right, and b) whether or not the dialects add to the realism or are just a distraction.
Most readers seem to prefer the King's English with all characters, regardless of who they are, but somehow I can hear the dialog better in my mind when the written word correlates with how a particular person would likely speak.
Anyone willing to read this?

If you're going to use phonetic spelling, please, please, please use it sparingly. Just a few words here and there will give it that "flavor" you're looking for without making it impossible for the reader to get through.

As an example: I'm southern, and although my accent isn't heavy at all, it's still rather noticeable to anyone not from the south, so I might "say" something like this (rendered in phonetic spelling), "Ah need to change the ole in my car sometime soon." (not the best example, but imagine pages and pages of that to wade through).

If I wanted to make a character obviously southern (which, to be honest, most of mine are ), then I would sprinkle a few "y'all"s here and there, and leave it at that.

Still showcases what part of the country the character comes from without being a bunch of nonsense words that a reader has to struggle to get through.

eta: what snooper said.

 

[palisa]

I thought I'd posted a response here, but no matter if it disappeared. Snooper and Charmbright have nailed the answer. Dialect has to be done with great restraint, or not at all.

The example I intended to cite was a story by James Thurber called "Bateman Comes Home" (or "goes home" or "comes back" or something like that -- the move to the new house is complete, but the boxes are still not all unpacked.) It's five pages or so of thick southern dialect and at the end, Thurber breaks off in mid-paragraph, gives us a carriage return and writes, "If you continue like this long enough, you've got a novel."

I don't know the history of the story, but it seems to me to be his disapproval of Faulkner-esqe dialect and rambling plot lines.

A frustrating example for me is "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon. written entirely in 18th-century English. This is an extreme example of dialect screwing up a story. It's a fascinating book, but I still haven't finished it after owning it for five years. Four hundred pages of dialect? The man obviously worked hard to prove some sort of a point, but gimme a break!

At least Shakespeare had an excuse for the suffering he inflicts to this day -- he was writing in standard English for his time.