From: mdhangton@gmail.com

Michelle Bottorff wrote:
> 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?  :)
>
No, because it's an obvious, recurrent pattern.

I have done it, drop the final g in participles, along with replacing
gonna for will, and o' for of.

The problem is when it involves ethnic characters.  You know somebody
will say it's racist.

> 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.
>  :)

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