Language matters! And don't you forget it.

[Vertigo]

A lot of writing is -- as would seem to be the case with the Leckie examples -- simply the writers' speaking voices written down, not the way they'd write prose or even dialogue**. As such, I think it's forgivable: most of us don't edit our speech, as it's produced instantaneously. We can, however, choose -- or train ourselves -- not to be upset by it.


** - Dialogue is, generally, tidied up speech.

I agree that this is probably the case for the Leckie quote and also that I was therefore being a little unfair but my grumble about that (ab)use of 'so' still stands!

 

[tinkerdan]

I agree; though I've always felt dialogue was in a flexible area.

A lot of writing is -- as would seem to be the case with the Leckie examples -- simply the writers' speaking voices written down, not the way they'd write prose or even dialogue**. As such, I think it's forgivable: most of us don't edit our speech, as it's produced instantaneously. We can, however, choose -- or train ourselves -- not to be upset by it.
** - Dialogue is, generally, tidied up speech.

By that I mean that it might be alright for one character to digress; but you have to guard against leaking into other character dialogue or they all begin to sound annoyingly the same. This has been something I have seen in many new authors. Even though they are an eclectic selection of characters, all of them have the same strange speech affectations.

 

[Ursa major]

I agree; though I've always felt dialogue was in a flexible area.

I think the idea is that writing dialogue as it would have been spoken is a bit like writing in dialect: if one has to do it at all, do it sparingly**. It's similar to editing out most of the irrelevant bits from our narratives as doing it too often adds nothing but risks pushing readers away; what "irrelevant" bits remain would be there to give a bit of depth to a scene, or to give a hint about what interests the PoV character other than direct aspects of the plot.


** - I had -- and perhaps still do (but I no longer "hear" it) -- a bad habit of starting too many sentences with "Actually", which would be bad enough in itself but became far worse by my ending many of those sentences by saying "actually" again. If I read a book where a character's dialogue was liberally sprinkled with this sort of thing, I'd not be praising the author for his or her realistic dialogue, but instead wondering why they hadn't edited it properly. One (or possibly two) examples would suffice, and perhaps only if there was a point to including it, such as letting the reader know that an otherwise unidentified character (or one unknown to the PoV character) was speaking.