From: mbottorff@lshelby.com

William Vetter  wrote:

> >> I ask because other people are talking about spellings that supposedly
> >> express English dialects.
> >
> > I'm not attempting to duplicate any particular English dialect, and I
> > hadn't planned to use variant spellings.
>
> "Out of the pan and into the far."
> I told him that he spelled _fire_ wrong.  He wrote back to me and said
> this was how people spoke it in rural Kentucky.

I think it's pretty silly to expect every reader of English everywhere
will a) be familiar with a Kentucky dialect, and would therefore b)
recognize that far was therefore not a typo for fire.

But at the same time, not being very good at figuring out what the
reader won't know is one of my biggest weaknesses, so I feel like I'm
the pot calling the kettle black when i say that.


Out of curiousity...

Would seein' words like bein', doin' and hearin' throw you?  :)

I used those back in the second and third books I wrote.  Although I've
mostly avoided phonetic spelling since then (I'm currently on book 14),
I haven't given up on someday revisiting those two books.

I don't currently see any reason for editing those out.  I don't think
they're particularly confusing or difficult to read.

But I read a fair number of Westerns growing up, so I might be biased.
:)

--
Michelle Bottorff -> Chelle B. -> Shelby
L. Shelby, Writer  http://www.lshelby.com/
Livejournal http://lavenderbard.livejournal.com/
rec.arts.sf.composition FAQ http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)