so, are we veering off into speech now, in a thread on the written word? that could be a humongous thread of its own, since there are lots of mispronunciations that bug the heck outa me... don't think we should hijack this one for it, though...
I can answer that one. I live in West Virginia, and I don't have an accent, but most people I know, when they are speaking, say 'are' for both. So it sounds like 'this is arr neighborhood.' I don't know which dialects pronounce it like that, but it must be in a region larger than WV.
The "alright"/"all right" thing annoys me also, considering my sixth grade-teacher made us take a spelling test on the correct spelling just to get it right. I also dislike when people get "affect" and "effect" wrong, and when I correct them they roll their eyes and say, "There's not that big a difference." If there wasn't that big a difference, there wouldn't have been two different words DX. Although this doesn't bug me as much, people who butcher the English language while on Facebook and forums and such just kind of... XP. I can understand if you can't take the time to capitalize or want to abbreviate, but "wunna" for "wanna"? "Defiantly" or "definantely" for "definitely"? There is no excuse for that.
Journalists - especially football reporters - in Britain: turgid does not mean what you think it means.
One of my pet peeves on grammar is when someone incorrectly enclose quotation marks. It bugs me whenever someone writes like this: Marla said, "Can I hold your hand"? The quotation mark should be after the question mark beecause the person quoting what Marla said wasn't the one who asked the question. The quoter would be writing like this in the correct form: "Mala said, "Can I hold your hand?" If the person was actually asking the question, it would be written like this: Did Marla say, "Can I hold your hand"? I hope that doesn't confuse anyone. I thought maybe that would be hard for some writers to know when to put the quotation mark after or before a question mark.
I may be wrong, but wouldn't there have to be a second question mark in that sentence for it to be correct? "Can I hold your hand" is a statement. "Can I hold your hand?" is a question. The speaker is saying "Did Marla say, 'Can I hold your hand?'?" I don't recall being taught this, if this is obvious, excuse my ignorance. I hope my curiosity is a good enough excuse haha
It should read 'May I hold your hand?' One question mark is enough. It is a question, not a statement.
UK grammar - 'Mala said, "Can I hold your hand?"' I think in the US the quotation marks are reversed, not sure. May in place of can would be correct English. Being that it is dialogue, it is whaterver the person said.
that would be a quote within a quote and would have to be punctuated like this: "Did Marla say, 'Can I hold your hand?'" [uk rules would reverse placement of ' ' and " "]... i don't believe the second ? would be mandatory, though logically it would make sense to have it there, since the person speaking is asking a question about someone asking a question...
I don't think the second ? would be necessary because if you think of the character saying it, there's still that upward inflection (I think that's what it's called, when a person raises their voice a bit at the end of a question in easier terms haha)
I agree with the 'could of' and 'should of' etc, but the one that irritates me the most is: "We better go now, bettern't we?" What the heck is that? It should be: "We'd better go now, hadn't we?" 'had' is the verb - not 'better'
I dislike it when people put commas inside quotation marks. "This chicken's hot", Niki said, vs. "This chicken's hot," Niki said. I've noticed that in a big part of literature the commas go inside the quotation marks. But hey, try to read those sentences aloud. In the latter the comma is actually in the end of the phrase the person is saying, as if the person would still continue their sentence in stead of finishing it there. If you get my point. Commas outside quotes might be a Finnish thing, though, but I find it making a lot more sense.
it's also a british thing... but in the us, commas and periods go inside, whether you like it, or not...
Does grammar matter if it is dialogue? Spelling, certainly, but there are plenty of rules that would sound a bit silly spoken. Ok, perhaps not spelling either. I may have a character that speaks with an impediment of some sort.
One thing that always jumps out at me and pulls me out of a story is when the author uses "which" when he/she should have used "that." Weird quirk, and I'm not sure why my brain latches on to the misuse the way it does.
At least in the US, commas inside punctuation marks is a punctuation rule - putting them outside would be flat-out incorrect. (In, again, the US. It sounds like putting them inside would be flat-out incorrect in Finnish.) ChickenFReak
I can't say I have any grammatical pet peeves - and it worries me somewhat that I fail to pick up on most of these mistakes. The way I see it, English is like water. No fixed shape, but merely fluid and constantly evolving (for better or worse.) While I'm sure prescriptivists have their place, as long as communication is clear... I suppose it's because I'm a big lover of dialect and sociolect, and wrote various monologues ranging from Geordies, Scots and to AAVE. They don't follow the rules of grammar. It's important to remember the context. Most human beings to not learn their mother tongue from an RP, standard point. They pick up their local quirks, and break the rules in favour of flavour, or covert prestige, as a linguist might call it. So, if the text in question is a character's voice, I would be suspicious if it grammatically correct. I'd argue it betrays an authentic voice, unless your character happens to be an upperclass grammar-nazi On the other hand, writing an academic dissertation might call for more than "Why, aye! I'm not a technical man, meself-like."
only if it's not germane to the character... that said, if you read enough good writing, you'll notice that dialog isn't really exactly how people speak to each other in real life...
