UntitledTown Book and Author Festival 2019

Do you stand "in line" or "on line"?  Are the words address and police accented on the first or second syllable?  Do you pronounce the word "can" the same way as a noun and as a verb?  Does bought rhyme with apricot? Does a child bring a bucket or a pail to the beach? These are the sorts of questions long used by linguistics to categorize dialects and by many a would-be Henry Higgins to identify the geographic origins of speakers at cocktail parties.  Unfortunately, they are also the sorts of questions that writers must ask to form convincing dialogue—and too few do so.  The results are characters who sound the identical.  This craft talk will share a few distinctive tricks to pepper prose with distinctive syntax and diction; participants will also discover ways of acquiring more of these devices on their own.