Writing Like We Talk: The Stylistic Implications

 

 

       The popularreception of Mark Twain’s writings prompted critics to view the depiction ofcolloquial speech in literary texts as legitimate art, enhancing realist,modernist, and contemporary fiction.  Yetsuch depictions require caution, for non-literary forms, when mingled withliterary discourse, pose significant stylistic concerns. 

     Oral discourse,and the modes often associated with it--movies, television, and modern theater, forexample--convey immediacy and emotion, characterized by pause fillers, emphaticintonations, and street slang.  Literary texts,on the other hand, connote cautious, planned, respectable language, the hallmarkof intellectual society.  The polarityextends further:  composed of the best inlanguage and thought, literature enjoys elite patrons and political prestige, suchthat many scholars to consider it a yardstick of culture.  However, decades of technological andcultural change have eroded the distinction between literary and non-literarydiscourse.  In the era of texting andemojis, steadfast adherence to literary convention risks archaic formality. 

     Knowing the formsorality takes in writing can help writers make more conscious sentence-levelchoices.  Quotes, perhaps the mostobvious conversational marker, represent a decision to distance quoted materialfrom the surrounding authorial voice.  Responsibilityfor the material, the quotes imply, belongs elsewhere.  Quotation marks, then, serve an importantrhetorical function.  Employing themsignifies a choice to call on outside voices, mingling a text’s literaryquality with conversational elements that, depending on context, may indicatethe writer’s deference to authority (and, by extension, intellectual privateproperty) or create distance between the author and statements deemed unfit fordirect association.

     To the extent that quotation marks signify extra-textual language, we may regard them as conversational.  However, not until thepost-Twain era did writers develop informal conversation as a literarytrope.  To glimpse the formality withwhich prior authors treated conversation, we might highlight the 18thCentury literary figure Samuel Johnson, whose biographer recorded conversationsnot in an immediate, emotional manner, but rather in planned aestheticsentences.  Presenting conversationaccording to the literary standards of the day, the biographer (Boswell) eschewed theconversational markers (italics, pause fillers, fragments, etc.) that pervademodern texts.  By contrast, modernwriters embrace features considered too informal by 18th Centurystandards.  Italics, for example, disruptthe visual uniformity of text in a way that suggests drama and emphasis.  Pay attention to this, they convey!  Since writing offers other means of emphasis, such as placing new information at the end of a clause, italics constitute adecision to favor the immediacy of oral markers.  Beyond italics, writers might employadditional techniques.  Running wordstogether (“whodunnit” for example) brings the hurried pace of oral discourse toa text by calling our attention not to the word but to the phonetic qualitiesof rapid speech.  Insofar as phonetics denote sound, foregrounding them implies a choice to create urgencyvia nonliterary means.  Similarly, theemotional tone suggested by fragments (i.e. “yummy!”) and the mental stumblessuggested by pause fillers (“um,” “well”), when written, bring emotionalimmediacy, imbuing the text with an improvised, even frenetic, tone.

     The markersdiscussed above present a key stylistic concern for writers.  Emphasizing a conversational tone through oraltext markers often means denying the use of literate methods.  When a writer foregrounds orality to excess,so that, as with strung-together words, the text unintentionally reads like acomic book, readers may conclude the writer lacks control.   Accordingly, recognizing the features ofboth literary and oral discourse can help writers more fully appreciate howmode affects meaning.  Once chosen, amode involves expectations and requirements. Just as graffiti requires an illicit canvas, and loses itscounter-culture impact if transmitted via Morse code or communicated through aTV commercial, so must writing intended as literature adhere to the expectationsof the literary mode.  Here theaesthetics of the pre-Twain eras retain their value: while conversational markerscan enhance a writer’s literary toolkit, they can’t in themselves substitutefor literature.

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