Don’t Touch that Dialect!

As you write your fiction, should you have your characters speaking in dialect? By this I mean the purposeful misspelling of words in a phonetic manner to indicate how your character is speaking them.

The study of dialect is fascinating and, as a fiction writer, you should be familiar with the dialect used by your characters. But the question is whether to indicate some or all of the character’s word pronunciations to the reader phonetically.

One good reason for doing so is to show authenticity...