: Re: What aspects of written dialogue are important when giving characters a unique voice? I have a project that I am working on in which I need to write quite a few fictional informal email correspondences

@Angela458

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You could use different spellings and punctuation depending on where the email originates from: favor vs favour; and inclusion, or not, of the oxford comma.

Some people write 'try and' instead of the more technically correct 'try to'. Often Americans use an extraneous preposition 'off of' when 'off' alone does the job. A sloppy writer might write 'would of' instead of 'would've'. Many writers use 'there's' as a plural dummy element: 'There's seven people coming for dinner' when 'There are seven people coming for dinner' would be used by the more careful writer.

Although you don't have the space or need to flesh out these characters, you should use their emails to say as much as you can to show their levels of education and the tone of what they're writing. I'd be using every trick in the book to make each one sound unique. The last thing you want is for all the emails to sound as though they were written by you.

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