: 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

@Phylliss352

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My feeling is that with accents and dialects less is usually more.

Part of the problem is that English in not a phonetic language and, even when people speak with an accent they don't necessarily write in it and there is a real danger in ending up with a totally incomprehensible mess of apostrophes and unfamiliar spelling which the reader has to stop and decode and unless the reader is reasonably familiar with the accent in question it doesn't actually add anything.

What is far better is to initially signal the accent in some way and then focus on getting the rhythm and vocabulary right.

I would say that your example is pretty much right, the words are legible and you get the sense of unusual speech patterns from the grammar and sentence construction and 'foreign' words are signalled by the typography so I know I can skip them without having to understand exactly what they mean.

For example I have no idea what våpens means but I get the gist from context and if I'm that interested I can look it up or not as the mood takes me (actually this is one of the great things about Kindle, as I often do want to look it up but forget).

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