: Using in' rather than ing in third person omniscient The characters I'm working with not only speak in rural slang [i.e. frequently drop the 'g' on words ending in 'ing'] but, as a third person

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I agree with previous answers: it is totally acceptable to have characters, and their external POV voice, talking in slang.

But I would also add that I don't see a problem using slang even for an omniscient 3rd person POV, at all. If the language slang adds flavor to the narration, rhythm and worldview, I would use it. A 3rd person omniscient is a rhetorical artifact anyway, so it would be impossible to pretend pure objectivity in it. Being a voice in itself, it is always an ideal character telling the story to the reader, so it's not wrong if it has a personality.

The risk, however, is that this technique can subtract neutrality, or be too redundant or invasive. It must be used with taste and cleverness.

(I think I stepped a bit astray from the original question - I hope this helps anyway).

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Even in the third person, if the narration is from the POV of a single character (as it should be, to avoid confusion), it's acceptable to phrase the narration the way the character thinks.

Be aware, however, that sometimes a character with an accent will think in "perfect" speech (Alex Kilgour in the Sten novels, for instance, by Alan Cole and Chris Bunch, deeply Scots in his speech but wrote in ordinary English), but the words come out of their mouth in a nearly unintelligible form; other times, they think in a dialect form because it's the way they grew up speaking.

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You're fine. If you're presenting the character's words, then you can do it in their own syntax, grammar, or pronunciation. Careful not to let that seep into the 3rd-person narrator's voice.

(I turn off spellcheck. I'll catch misspellings during proofreadin'.)

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