Grammar

[MelissaBaby]

Maybe those are both US English. "Of" in the place of "have" is commonly spoken , and in a lot of cases using "have" would feel stilted. Using the contraction "could've" (for instance) is more natural, but sounds very much like "could of."

"Drug" (according to Merriam-Webster, hence US English) is a dialectical past tense of "drag." If your dialogue is in that dialect, then it isn't an error.

I think that people just use "would've" or "should've" as contractions for "would have" or "should have" and the V sound just morphed into "of".

Edit: I guess I should HAVE read the whole thread, because I see that point that already been made.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Everyone exists with a dialect, which is established both in what they say and what they write (and, as I well know, can quickly change with a change in their environment). Some overthinking and over assuming and asserting going on here.

Correct grammar is just the dialect of the ruling class.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I do it to a limited extent. Not nearly as much as it's done in real life, but enough to make it "real life" comfortable for readers and to keep it storyteller informal.

I think that's the right approach. Most of my characters are Mainers. If I wrote all of their dialogue in the natural dialect, many readers would struggle to follow. If it doesn't matter in the specific situation, I think it's better to just suggest the dialect.

 

[stickygirl]

One of my story characters is Polish and I write her dialogue to reflect it; so spelling is correct but she has a way of using English incorrectly. In real life I know several East Europeans and I'm fascinated by how they use the language and charmed by their mistakes.

Typos and grammars make my brain jump - one or two are acceptable, but an excess is tiresome.

I do notice when people verbally use could ofs and innits if only to moderate my own language in responding to them. If you reply to a delivery guy with 'Good day, my fine fellow' it's not going to go down well - they already have a shitty job, why make it worse by making them uncomfortable?

I might look at Grammarly but the chummy-patronising sound of the voice-over makes me retch, so I could never buy it out of principle.

[I'm sure everyone posting has tripled checked their words to avoid face-palms here ]

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

Correct grammar is just the dialect of the ruling class.

This.

 

[NoJo]

That's pretty close what Henry Higgins said in one of his speeches in Pygmalion.

 

[KeithD]

That's pretty close what Henry Higgins said in one of his speeches in Pygmalion.

"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now,
Should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir,
Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too!"

(Played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady once.)

 

[gordo12]

I might look at Grammarly but the chummy-patronising sound of the voice-over makes me retch, so I could never buy it out of principle.

Too bad, because it does a decent job. I've had compliments since I started using the paid version. There is an option to choose creative writing when you start.

[I'm sure everyone posting has tripled checked their words to avoid face-palms here ]

It's that little green dot hovering up in the corner every time I write. Sometimes, I pay attention, but every so often, the urge to slum........

And the day I loaded a Western into it, it shut down, went offline and refused to speak to me. It took a while to coax it back.

However, it has a new feature I really like. Because I use Libre Office, which it doesn't have a module for, I have to load the entire story after I write it. (I could write it inside the software but don't like doing that.)

The new feature pops up. "You made 192 errors you've made before" Click the button to fix all of them at once! Maybe a few errors didn't need fixing, but it's faster to find those after than wade through all those corrections.

 

[Emirus]

Correct grammar is just the dialect of the ruling class.

I didn’t realise you knew so much about me. Obviously, I always use Received Pronunciation, my dear, as does my close friend, Lizzie.

 

[Emirus]

One of my story characters is Polish and I write her dialogue to reflect it; so spelling is correct but she has a way of using English incorrectly. In real life I know several East Europeans and I'm fascinated by how they use the language and charmed by their mistakes.

Typos and grammars make my brain jump - one or two are acceptable, but an excess is tiresome.)]

I agree with what you say about those whose primary language is not English and their nationality is made clear in the story. In fact, it can be quite endearing. The Yoda principle.

Typo’s and grammar mistakes are unacceptable unless you are writing in English when it’s not your primary language. Those writers are the ones who are regularly asking for help with their English which is different from those writers for whom English is their primary language, who understand the problems readers may have, and don’t give a damn.

My primary language is English. I still make mistakes. So I do something about it. I submit an edit and (try to) make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.

 

[jaF0]

I have noticed recently that the newest fad in form software that is taking over most boards (Xenforo), seems to have some form of grammar checker built in. I'm not sure what all it picks up on yet, but I've seen it flag simple things like missing commas and misplaced dashes or slashes.

 

[Handley_Page]

Correct grammar is just the dialect of the ruling class.

No; "An EDUCATED Class".
The statement reflects badly upon the education system AND the media.
It's simply lazy !

 

[Bramblethorn]

No; "An EDUCATED Class".
The statement reflects badly upon the education system AND the media.
It's simply lazy !

Who decides which grammar is 'correct'?

 

[jaF0]

Red is grey and yellow white.

But we decide which is right.

 

[SimonDoom]

Correct grammar is just the dialect of the ruling class.

There's some truth to this, but for an author, I think the most helpful way to see it is that it's a convention that's helpful to facilitate communication, regardless of who is responsible for putting the convention in place. Mastering grammar doesn't make one a slave to the ruling class. It empowers one to communicate one's stories more effectively to a larger audience of readers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Who decides which grammar is 'correct'?

Grammarians. It's a self-eating watermelon .

 

[KeithD]

Who decides which grammar is 'correct'?

For any published work, the publisher.

 

[Bramblethorn]

There's some truth to this, but for an author, I think the most helpful way to see it is that it's a convention that's helpful to facilitate communication, regardless of who is responsible for putting the convention in place. Mastering grammar doesn't make one a slave to the ruling class. It empowers one to communicate one's stories more effectively to a larger audience of readers.

True up to a point, but notions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar often go far beyond facilitating communication, and often run against it.

For instance, English has developed various second-person plural forms: "youse", "y'all", etc. etc. Do they facilitate communication? Undoubtedly yes: they make the language less ambiguous, and they're easily understood even to somebody who hasn't encountered the idiom before.

But despite that, they're considered "incorrect" or at best "informal", and I'm not aware of a justification for that beyond "that's how the lower classes speak".

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Have you ever read "Forrest Gump"? The entire narrative is presented by the main character in his dialect.

That is just one example of proper grammar being legitimately excused for the sake of the story.

 

[Emirus]

I read all my dialogue aloud. If I think it sounds right for the character it stays. If I think it doesn’t sound right for that character it gets changed. When checking your work I think there’s a lot to be said for reading with your ears as well as your eyes.

 

[TadOverdon]

Grammarly is a nice free support tool. It has its limits. It's helped me a good deal with comma faults. Sometimes I don't follow its guidance but at least I'm making a conscious stylistic decision that I know I'll have to live with.

Has anyone trying running free Grammarly on passages by well-known fiction authors, just for fun? I'm sure someone has.

ETA: For fun I ran free Grammarly against "Big Two-Hearted River." Unsurprisingly it objected to missing commas and hyphenation as well as instances of supposed verb-noun disagreement. Came up with 389 basic issues in just over 8000 words.

Also, colloquial speech is obviously frequently agrammatic. There is a deep structure to speech, though, and it's possible to get it wrong. That's when we say that it doesn't "sound right."

It's been useful to try to learn consistent typographic conventions for rendering stuttering and hesitation and the like. Use of familiar or common conventions helps readability IMHO.

 

[gordo12]

I read all my dialogue aloud. If I think it sounds right for the character it stays. If I think it doesn’t sound right for that character it gets changed. When checking your work I think there’s a lot to be said for reading with your ears as well as your eyes.

I like writing westerns. I've been trying to develop a voice with them. I loaded part of a 25,000-word story in, and the poor software fainted. Over 1000 "errors" I'm going to HAVE to go with my ear.

Grammarly is a nice free support tool. It has its limits. It's helped me a good deal with comma faults. Sometimes I don't follow its guidance, but at least I'm making a conscious stylistic decision that I know I'll have to live with.

Has anyone trying running free Grammarly on passages by well-known fiction authors, just for fun? I'm sure someone has.

ETA: For fun I ran free Grammarly against "Big Two-Hearted River." Unsurprisingly it objected to missing commas and hyphenation as well as instances of supposed verb-noun disagreement. Came up with 389 basic issues in just over 8000 words.

Also, colloquial speech is obviously frequently agrammatic.

I find around 5% are reported as errors, so that number is right on the money. But maybe a third of that isn't correct (for the story), and the rest is good advice. I also like it because the paid version will pop up and say there are 100 errors you've agreed with before and a fix them all button. That takes a lot of the work out of editing. (PS: Grammarly wanted to join 'work out' as 'workout', which is incorrect) (now it wants me to make it 'a workout', which is also incorrect)

 

[TadOverdon]

Yes, hyphenation is one of its bugaboos.

 

[wifeisslutty]

I am not a fan of reading stories where it is obvious the writer didn't even attempt to follow grammatical norms or spell check but I think commenters are overly tedious when it comes to grammar.

Even as this post shows, I believe sometimes what people call bad grammar is the writers local cadence and the way they, and their peers normally talk, and it shows up inadvertently in their writing. Although it may not be English teacher perfect, I think it sometimes helps to get a sense of the writer and lets the dialogue flow better.

Stories can be overly grammatically correct, and make the story itself suffer. How many drunk college kids use the word "whom"?

Nearly everyone I know locally, uses the term drug, instead of dragged. I find myself having to correct this in my writing often to be grammatically correct even though I would normally not say dragged in a conversation with my family.

People still bitch about the word "ain't" when used in dialogue, even though it is one of the most common words used in casual conversation, around me anyway.

I find it annoying for people to focalize on small grammatical mistakes, when reading amateur smut stories on the internet. Especially with blanket statements like the grammar made it unreadable, instead of giving the writer actual feedback, because they are not competent enough to read stories in their head and insert their own cadence and grammar into it.

 

[KeithD]

Right. it's perfectly fine if the grammar of dialogue matches the education level of the speaker--although, for reading clarity, this usually is reined in to "enough to get the flavor" rather than totally true to the reality even if it drags the reader into incomprehension.