: First, lemme say i like Henry Taylor's answer. Hmm. Obviously, you're going to attribute more-sophisticated words to more-sophisticated people. It's not too difficult to tell when someone drops

@Cody1607638

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First, lemme say i like Henry Taylor's answer.

Hmm. Obviously, you're going to attribute more-sophisticated words to more-sophisticated people. It's not too difficult to tell when someone drops an "SAT word" on you. Your ear's a good judge. Try occasionally running a choice word of dialogue through a Synonym list. Then it's just a matter of consistently choosing words for that character that're similar in complexity. Grammar counts too of course. Bad grammar can be based in ignorance, but much of the time even well-educated people don't just disregard "proper" grammar, they pick and choose which rules they'll follow. For your more extreme characters, it's just a matter of polish. For more sophisticated/formal characters, analyze your writing and then correct the rules that you realize you've broken (ending sentences in prepositions, doublenegatives, etc.). For more immature/informal characters, think about the rules present that you've followed -and break them. It sounds artificial, but it's a mechanism that'll at least get you headed in the right direction -especially if the character doesn't inspire "naturally".

One way to TEST/gauge what you're writing is to run it through an analyzer. I'm no MS fan, but there's one included in Word. support.office.com/en-au/article/Test-your-document-s-readability-0adc0e9a-b3fb-4bde-85f4-c9e88926c6aa . At the end of a spell&grammar check, it gives you "Readbility Statistics" including word count, but also (most importantly for us) "Reading Ease" and "Grade Level". There're a bunch of online ones too. Top one in a search for me was readability-score.com . They're not going to write for you and they're probably not completely accurate, but they should at least get you Relatively where you need to be. It'd show you, with hard metrics, what dialogue is "smarter" and what dialogue is "dumber".

That's my plan anyway. Good luck to you.

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