Brett Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero and that was apparently ver heavily edited befoe publication. When that was successful they did almost no editing on American Psycho and that's apparently just sphincter-cruahingly hard to read, or at least to concentrate on.
Using the full stop too much. It leads to sentences that are easily read. The problem with that is the sound of each sentence. The staccato rhythm doesn't suit elegant prose.
Your readers have long attention spans and can cope with a sentence that, because of the elegance of the words and because of the subject that's being discussed in the course of the sentence, by which I mean those things that arevealed not only by what is being discussed but also by how the emotional and psychological strength of the sentence is affected by the choice and order of the words, can coney what you're trying to say.
I will say that if you can't read back what yoy're writing as you write it, these run on sentences become a dangerous thing to mess with :(
Lastly, dialogue is reported speech and so if it's between the quote marks, represent it with slang and contractions all the way. It's not so badly removed from English (sytandard Egnlish) that it would sound some of the phoneticattempts of the 19th century to reproduce dialects.
There's also a good book called The Atlast of English Dialects which might be helpful.
And really lastly, o you still have my Office 2007? :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Sun, Sep. 6th, 2009 11:53 am (UTC)Using the full stop too much. It leads to sentences that are easily read. The problem with that is the sound of each sentence. The staccato rhythm doesn't suit elegant prose.
Your readers have long attention spans and can cope with a sentence that, because of the elegance of the words and because of the subject that's being discussed in the course of the sentence, by which I mean those things that arevealed not only by what is being discussed but also by how the emotional and psychological strength of the sentence is affected by the choice and order of the words, can coney what you're trying to say.
I will say that if you can't read back what yoy're writing as you write it, these run on sentences become a dangerous thing to mess with :(
Lastly, dialogue is reported speech and so if it's between the quote marks, represent it with slang and contractions all the way. It's not so badly removed from English (sytandard Egnlish) that it would sound some of the phoneticattempts of the 19th century to reproduce dialects.
There's also a good book called The Atlast of English Dialects which might be helpful.
And really lastly, o you still have my Office 2007? :)