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Originally posted by Tiresmoke:
**One thing though I would like to point out. Most people do not talk in a gramatically correct way. For my purposes in the storyline I am writing, the charactors speak much the same as those people around me in business do. Of course without the specific terms and such that do not apply. If you want to draw the player into the charactor then the charactor should talk in a human manner and not be a proffesor of English Lit or some such. That is at least my way of looking at things. While my plug may not be grammer checked it is at least spell checked and I have beta testers to let me know when things don't make much sense to them.
While I know not everyone will agree with me on this topic I still feel right in my assumptions on this subject and will likely be less inclined to take someone to seriously that has comments on my grammer this story.
A case can also be made for misspellings if it is done for a particular purpose in a storyline. For instance you could create a charactor that has a heavy accent or local dialect. In that case mispelling so long as it is consistant can enhance the story rather than detract from it so long as the writer goes about things in such a way that their audience can understand and follow the reasons for such.
**
Well, maybe. People rarely talk in what would be correct written grammar, and they often speak in a fragmented way. But this doesn't mean you can make speech more realistic by making it ungrammatical. You have to develop a fine ear for how people speak, and represent that on paper. I've never met anyone who could do that who couldn't also write good, clean prose.
The same is true for describing heavy accents — this isn't misspelling. The technical term is 'writing phonemically'. But there are actually rules for this as well. Most writers flag up the person's accent when they first speak. For example, you could write: "'Great', he said, but he drew out the vowel as if he was saying 'grey' with a 't' at the end." After that, it's ok to write phonemically.
Some kinds of grammatical mistakes are always wrong and look stupid even when you are recording someone's speech. For example, if you write "it's" when you mean 'belonging to it', or "its" when you mean 'it is'. Likewise, if you confuse 'they're' with 'there' or 'their'. The only time these would work would be when you were reporting something someone had written. For example, in John Masefield's Box of Delights, Kay finds a note which says: 'Rum Chops Cap. Ands orf. This means U.'
Tiresmoke, let me recommend that you take everyone's comments seriously, especially if you disagree with them. If one person is annoyed enough by what they see as a fault to mention it, ten people will have been annoyed enough to stop playing your plug who didn't bother to tell you. The two biggest criticisms that people make of plugins (generalising over the last eight years) are 1) it was buggy and 2) it was full of misspellings and grammatical errors. It's actually very hard to get into a story if the grammar keeps on jumping up and slamming you in the face. Strive to make your writing natural, which means, in a sense, making it invisible — people notice what you are saying, not how you are saying it. Once you have achieved that, you can start making it distinctive when there is a reason for it — to highlight emotion, to portray a particular character, to set the scene, whatever.
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people who don't read traditional lettering or don't read simplified not understand the text. It does make for increased realism though.
Wow. That really disgressed. On a more on-topic note, would you find it beneficial to make historical references within plug's? And do you think most people would get it? This would be mostly in the planetary descriptions and such.