Gonna Get You

[dr_mabeuse]

I hate dialect. I know it can be used, but I'm pretty bad at it, and I've read some good storieds that were just made ridiculous by the inept use of dialect.

But say you've got a thuggish, ill-bred villain about to pounce on the hero. Does he really have to say, "I'm going to get you!" in Queen's English or can you get away with "I'm gonna get you!"? or even "gunna"?

And if you allow "gonna", where then do you draw the line? Why not then "getchoo"?

Does anyone bow to vernacular speech in their dialogue?


---dr.M.

 

[snooper]

Does he really have to say, "I'm going to get you!" in Queen's English or can you get away with "I'm gonna get you!"? or even "gunna"?

And if you allow "gonna", where then do you draw the line?

I tend to duck this problem by saying something like:

"with a foul oath he leapt on [the hero]".

I just cannot bring myself to use "gonna", but I don't comment on it to people whose stories I am editing. Some publishing houses actually ban all attempts at dialect, and I must admit that I have some sympathy.

When they roites loik thaat, deest casn't tell wot they do men, cas't?

As my Dorsetshire (England) friends would say.

 

[SexySoBeChick]

I use it sparingly. I think you use enough to give your characters' speech color, but not so much that your writing becomes unreadable.

In the context you described, I'd go with the "gonna."

And I believe the way you spell the contraction of "get you" is "getcha." As in—I'm gonna getcha, sucka!

When I first started writing seriously, I ran into this problem a lot. How do you spell words and phrases you often hear in common speech when you've never seen them written down? I actually started my own database of slang/dialect/colloquialisms from examples I'd found in other writers' writing. So far, I'm up to five different spellings for the contracted version of "son of a bitch." LOL

I know I've been guilty of writing "whatcha doin'?" But I don't do it too often or that extensively, because I worry about readability. And I'm sure my spellchecker is very grateful, too.

SSBC

 

[bridgeburner]

Sobe's got the right of it.

A sparing use of slang or colloquialisms will suggest a certain dialect to the reader so that if you say "gonna" you don't have to use "getcha" because you've already given the signal to relax the speech pattern and the reader hears what you want him to hear without you having to torture the language too much.

 

[Jan_Comenius]

Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson is an education in the effective exercise of dialect to create mood. But what about Huck Finn, or Queequeg in Moby Dick? I feel that well-written, consistent dialect can add realism to a story in a heartbeat, especially in this genre, where so much of the allure comes from the fact that scrolling down the screen takes place in smaller chunks than turning a page and feasting your eyes on a recto-verso piece of newness.

In web-published fiction, dialect slows the eye, which tends to get accustomed to moving down a computer screen at warp speed, skimming and scanning for valuable information amidst a sea of ads and the occasional dreaded popup. Even when readers actually want to focus rather than sit back and enjoy themselves, their attempts can be ruined by the format, as anyone who's tried to read online professional journals can attest.

Badly written dialect, however, seems to increase the reader's tendency to punch the down arrow far more than it cause a print reader to flip a page or two. Computer readers seem to switch between reading for gist and reading in detail as easily as a retiree who can devour four or five papers every morning at the public library.

And, finally, who says you can't spell something six different ways? English evolved as a vernacular language and it was only the birth of print and publishing-house standards that forced spellers and usage guides upon an unwilling, barely-literate public. Anyone who tries to convince me that the common British English spelling of "queueing" necessarily requires five vowels in a row by reason of purity of sense is, well, a lunatic at large.

Must...avoid...Newspeak!