posted
What do you think? If I were to purposefully put typos in a short story to try to represent a real-life blog entry will that come across as carelessness on my part or will it help the reality?
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
|
posted
Depends on how it is executed. So long as it is clear you are recreating the blog and the reader understands that blogs are often full of typos, then you should be fine.
That said I don't think any reader would look at a non-typo'd version and think, hey there should be some typos in this.
posted
I did that in one story and nobody liked it. Most people, however, DID prefer I stick with the acronyms so popular today, such as ROTFL, LOL, L8R, etc...
I wasn't sure I wanted to because I wasn't sure if it would stand the test of time -- namely, would those colloquialized terms really mean anything ten years from now? If someone reading the book runs into LOL fifteen years down the road and has no clue what it means, have I lost them? Maybe.
Personally I think it's perfectly okay to misspell things or shorten words, but my experience was not many people liked it. I think they look at it like dialogue -- people do say things like "y'all" and "that aint got nuttin to do wid it"...but we still type the dialogue in a normal/correct fashion.
my 2 pennies (which seem to be increasingly worthless...I may have to start giving my four cents worth instead...inflation, you know?).
posted
Personally, I don't like reading blogs with misspellings - I know I have Issues about this, but I would find a character who took the time to get her blog spelled right more sympathetic and likeable than a character with poor spelling.
The best example I can think of, though, where bad spelling was used to good effect, is Flowers for Algernon.
posted
I guess my advice must be worth a little less then, or else I need to start offering 3¢ CAD
As for the mispellings, I would be cautious and only use them sparingly. I don't know if this would work, but perhaps you could specifically draw attention to the errors. That way it would seem like part of the story rather than sloppiness or ignorance on your part.
[This message has been edited by Robyn_Hood (edited January 20, 2005).]
posted
Then I suppose my two yen are worth even less. But here they are anyway, Typos drive me crazy so I would dislike it if you put them in. Because you are writing a story not drawing a blog. LoL and that are the language of our times. Just like Forsoothe means nothing today, that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been written then.
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
|
posted
It depends on how you handle it. If the story is told entirely in misspelled blogging, yeah, I'd be annoyed. If the blogs simply punctuate the story and are clearly denoted as such, then go ahead and make them realistic--something a teenage would write. You should SEE my thirteen-year-old's handwritten assignments! They didn't do a very good job of teaching her handwriting or spelling in real school, so we're spending valuable time correcting those problems at home.
You'd just have to be careful not to overdo, not to make the blogs difficult to translate for us non-blogging literate adults.
posted
Thanks for your comments all. The way I was pondering using the typos was to show that a person's mental state was deteriorating over time so her early blog messages would be fine but then they would get sloppier and slopper. I finally decided that there were better ways to show this and I agreed whole-heartedly with HuntGod's assessment that he wouldn't start thinking it needed some typos if there weren't any. That's how I often feel about bad language and dialect in any story (to a certain extent...there is an element of voice that needs to come through).
Anyway, thanks for all the pennies, British, American, and yes, even Canadian. (cheapskates...could at least give me a Canadian dollar...I think it's worth about 2 pennies )
posted
i just checked a bunch of exchange rates for the heck of it (partly because of the yen thing...)
and as i expected, AUD averages as being worth the least (-1.3 % compared to USD) and yen isn't bad, it averages -.5 % compared to USD, CAD is almost -1 % compared to USD, and so on.
posted
Remember 'Flowers for Algernon"? The way it went up in legibility, and then back down. I thought that was an excellent method of showing the character's state of mind. Intelligence, too.
posted
That's what you get for hanging around a bunch of bright and creative people who like talking to other bright and creative people.
Posts: 1041 | Registered: Aug 2004
|
posted
I'd put mispellings in a letter by a semi-illiterate; why not in a blog? But not enought to make it hard to read; or else keep the blog part short. Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
|
posted
You can indicate intelligence level as well by word choice as you can by spelling. (In fact, poor spelling does not necessarily mean lower intelligence, and vice versa.)
Anyway, on word choice: I refer you to Rita Mae Brown's advice in STARTING FROM SCRATCH (I think), where she encourages writers to use words of one syllable (Anglo-Saxon-ish) for characters with less education or lower intelligence and words with many syllables (Latinate) for characters with more education or higher intelligence.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't just the spelling that improved and then degraded in FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, it was also the vocabulary.
And English has enough words of one or many syllables to make this kind of characterization possible.
posted
And the mentation level. He just wasn't writing about the same things.
That said, spelling in something that purports to be a direct quote from a document written in English is a perfectly valid tool, as least as much as creating an artificial document in the first place. It's really not that different from having a sign reading "Ye olde Somthing Shoppe" or a character named "Kristine".
Printer-friendly view of this topic
( 
)
