: Re: Does misspelling words for the sake of bad English improve the immersion or distract the reader? I am trying to write a character that speaks English poorly. I do not want to grossly misspell

@Welton431

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I wouldn't write that way. When I read, I internally hear what the characters are saying, and I certainly cannot hear any misspellings!

If they are using slang or an actual local dialect, "y'all" or "fuhgeddaboutit" might be what I hear. Those are not misspellings, they are an accurate representation of what you hear. But I'd leave out "sound effects" of drawls, slurring, or missing words, nobody in my writing is going to say "butt'n up yer fly" instead of "button up your fly".

Write out the words that people understand regardless of accent or dialect. If what we hear or understand is different enough to actually count as its OWN word, like "y'all" or "fuhgeddaboutit", then I might write that out.

Do not misspell a word if the listener can actually tell what the word is supposed to be. And if your character can't understand it, you should make sure the READER can't figure it out, either.

If you listen to foreign speakers (and I did all the time with foreign students) the problem is not that they are unclear, but that they fail to understand articles and pronouns and other connecting speech, and they often use standard tenses instead of special tenses, much like a six year old. As in, "We are getting the burgers" when asked what they are doing for lunch. Or "we already eated."

Late add: I guess one exception I have seen that seemed alright, was a main character we have seen several times imitating an accent (invented for an alien) for the fun of it. In that case, what he is saying doesn't sound "right" to either him or the person he is conversing with; and the humor they feel would not be apparent without the misspellings. To generalize, the mini-scene demands the distinction in sounds to work; whereas in nearly all other circumstances it doesn't, and a constant reminder of an accent just gets tiresome and increases the reading difficulty. Real people would get used to the accent and hear what was said, both speaker and listener adapt to make their conversation smoother.

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