Tag Archives: Hemingway

Dialogue she wrote, Agatha Christie-ly: Adverbs in “And Then There Were None”

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Agatha2

Agatha Christie in the 1970s

After watching the latest adaptation of And Then There Were None, I decided to finally sit down and read it. I already knew “whodunnit”, and how they did it (clever, clever!), and I’d already seen at least two other adaptations of Agatha Christie’s most loved crime novel (each at least twice). But I was now keen to know how she wrote it.

One of the most immediate aspects of Christie’s writing is her crisp, efficient style. Her focus is on action and dialogue. There is only a limited amount of descriptive prose, with only the occasional simile or metaphor. But what struck me most was her extensive use of adverbs, especially as modifiers of the reporting verbs of direct speech (“she said”, “he exclaimed”, and so on).

Here’s a typical example of dialogue from the novel:

   Vera said hoarsely:
   ‘I don’t understand you.’
   Her fingers worked spasmodically. She felt suddenly afraid of this quiet old soldier.
   He said musingly:
   ‘You see, I loved Leslie. I loved her very much…’
   Vera said questioningly:
   ‘Was Leslie your wife?’

Christie uses this “she said X-ly” construction prolifically. Reading through, I counted at least 46 different adverbs employed in this way. They include: abruptly, angrily, apologetically, anxiously, bitterly, conventionally, critically, decisively, dryly, easily, genially, gravely, hotly, quickly, (“almost”) mechanically, mildly, pacifically, questioningly, slowly, softly, sulkily, unsteadily, vehemently, violently, wonderingly. (Probably my favourite, used to describe the abrasive tones of Judge Wargrave, was “acidly” – which I thought Charles Dance captured perfectly in the adaptation.)

The reason Christie’s extensive use of adverbs in dialogue is so striking is because it’s so out of fashion among contemporary writers. Stylists from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy have tended to eschew them completely. Stephen King went so far as to write that the “road to hell is paved with adverbs”. Jenifer Egan, in her 2006 novel The Keep, even leaves out most reporting verbs, instead rendering dialogue as in a screenplay, so adverbs don’t even have anywhere to sit. It’s no surprise that much of the advice out there on the internet for novice writers is pretty clear on the subject: leave the adverbs out! In her novel, Egan even goes so far as to poke fun at this literary prejudice:

   […] She said, I don’t like facts.
   Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.
   Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.
   Danny: She moaned helplessly.
   Nora: He ran stiffly.
   Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs in New York?

The reasons for this contemporary animosity towards adverbs, however, are often a little opaque. One online guide I found states vaguely that adverbs “weaken your writing” and urges writers to use “stronger, more specific words”. In his essay, King gives similar reasons saying, for example, that “Utterson said contemptuously” is “weaker” than “Utterson said” – even though it’s not entirely clear how the “strength” of a word should be measured.

However, that’s not to say there aren’t some valid reasons for leaving out adverbs. The first of these is irrelevance. If it doesn’t add to plot or character development, and it doesn’t help the reader understand what’s going on, then (following Orwell’s advice) there’s no reason to modify the reporting verb with an adverb. The second is redundancy. In sentences like “she whispered quietly” and “he shouted loudly”, because of the semantic overlap between the reporting verb and the adverb, the adverb becomes mostly superfluous.

The third reason to eliminate adverbs, and perhaps the most convincing, is what one editor refers to as author intrusion. The argument is that when the author tells us what is going on in dialogue, for example through the use of adverbs, they get in the way of the reader’s natural understanding of the dialogue itself. Sociolinguists would say that, whenever an author uses an adverb, they take a stance. That is, they make a subjective judgement about the relevant character and their speech: what mood they are in, what message they are trying to convey beyond the words they are speaking, even how loud they are speaking relatively to some norm, and so on. In doing so, we suddenly become conscious of the author, and their own subjectivity, while the interlocutors in the dialogue get pushed into the background. For this reason, the argument goes that it’s better to simply show us what is happening through plain reporting verbs or, in Egan’s case, nothing but the dialogue itself.

Christie, however, would surely disagree. Certainly there’s no redundancy or irrelevance in her masterful prose and, as a reader, I don’t find her adverbs intrusive or distracting. Instead, the adverbs help to render the finer points of speech. The challenge with the “show” approach to dialogue is that, with only 26 letters of the alphabet and a limited number of punctuation marks, it’s very difficult to capture the various linguistic levels at which information is conveyed in conversation (although Jack Kerouac had a go in Visions of Cody). Christie’s adverbs add important nuances about the characters, such as Wargrave’s “acid” manner, which ultimately serve as clues to who the murderer might be – or, more often than not, as red herrings.

The adverbs enhance the writing in other ways too. For me, the prosodic structure of “she said X-ly” has a pleasing rhythmic quality, especially when a three-syllable adverb gives rise to a musical triplet (“he said bitterly”). The repetition of the “she said X-ly” construction throughout Christie’s prose is also a neat example of parallelism – one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book.

Fashions may have changed since 1939 when And Then There Were None was published. But there’s no denying that Agatha Christie was a great writer – how else could she have become the best selling author of all time? So, if she used an arsenal of different adverbs in her dialogue, then perhaps they’re not so bad after all.

 

 

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From William Shakespeare to Amy Tan: Do bilinguals make better writers? (2)

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IMG_7123In my last post, I started to argue that there is a link between bilingualism – the ability to speak a second language to some degree of proficiency – and linguistic creativity. That is, bilinguals like Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway were better writers in English because they could speak at least one other language as well.

My argument was based purely on anecdote – essentially that, if you look at any list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, a large number of the authors represented will be proficient in another language.

However, there is more than just anecdotal evidence to support the claim. Over the last four decades, there has been a huge amount of research on the potential advantages (and disadvantages) of bilingualism on various aspects of cognition. This includes a growing amount of research on the link between bilingualism and creativity.

Before looking at the research it’s worth first defining some terms. As human beings, we have the capacity to perform various mental processes. Creativity, just one of these processes, is actually a fairly complex concept. In everyday life, being “creative” can mean anything from being good at solving maths problems to being handy with a paintbrush.

Among scientists, a commonly accepted definition is that creativity is the ability to come up with novel and useful (or appropriate) ideas. And the production of these ideas is generally assumed to involve two different mental processes. The first process, divergent thinking, involves producing a number of different ideas in response to some question or problem. The second, convergent thinking, involves searching and analysing these ideas to find the most appropriate one(s). So, if I want to complete the sentence “the man screamed like a…”, divergent thinking is coming up with noun phrases like “banshee”, “baby”, and “boy scout”. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is settling on “chimpanzee on fire”.

When it comes to producing novel ideas, divergent thinking is key. Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast”. Coining such a memorable metaphor for the City of Light needed both divergent and convergent thinking but, without the former, the latter would have got Hemingway nowhere. As a result, most researchers interested in creativity tend to focus on measuring individuals’ ability to think divergently. To do so, they tend to employ one of a number of standard tests.

In these tests people might be shown random doodles (something like the inkblot test) and asked to write down as many ideas as they can for what they might represent. Or, they might be shown some visual puzzle and asked to come up with creative solutions to it. One of the most common tests, the Torrance Test, evaluates three aspects of divergent thinking based how many ideas individuals produce in a set period of time (“fluency”), how different the ideas are from each other (“flexibility”), and how different they are to ideas that other people come up with (“novelty”).

In the 1970s, in an early study of bilingualism and creativity, a researcher at the University of North Dakota looked at how elementary school students performed on the Torrance Test (Landry, 1973). The first two groups of students, from the second and sixth grades, were at an elementary school that provided a foreign language programme. The second two groups of students attended an elementary school, which didn’t provide any foreign language tuition. All students in the study had English as their first language. Although there was no significant difference found between the two groups of second-grade students, the researcher found that sixth-grade girls who had received bilingual education did perform better in measures of fluency and flexibility.

In a more recent study, a researcher at the University of Haifa compared the creative thinking abilities of bilingual Russian-Hebrew children in both Hebrew-language and dual-language Kindergartens in Israel, against those of monolingual Hebrew-speaking children (Leikin, 2012). The children, from similar socio-economic backgrounds, were tested at the start of Kindergarten and then, again, one year later. The researcher found that there was no significant difference between the divergent thinking of the three sets of students in the first round of tests. However, when the tests were repeated, the bilingual students in the dual-language programme performed significantly better (in terms of flexibility and novelty) compared to the monolingual group, suggesting that regular exposure to two languages at school did enhance creative thinking.

Doing this sort of research is always challenging and it’s almost impossible to control for all the factors – age, socioeconomic background, education level, cultural background, and so on – that might affect the creative performance of the individuals concerned. Even establishing a study group with similar levels of mono- or bilingualism is challenging enough. When it comes to speaking multiple languages, everyone is different, for example in terms of whether they speak a second language at home, when they began learning the language, how many other languages they might speak, and what those languages are. For example, researchers (including an old Professor of mine) recently found that habitual code-switchers performed better on the Torrance Test than non-habitual ones (Kharkhurin & Wei, 2015). Inevitably, whenever you measure the creativity of any random sample of people – bilingual or otherwise – you will get a wide range of scores. Although everyone is creative, some people are just naturally more creative than others.

Despite the research challenges, most researchers are now in agreement that there is a positive correlation between bilingualism and creative thinking. That is, on average, bilinguals are more likely to be more creative thinkers (and therefore more creative writers) than their monolingual counterparts.

The next question, of course, is why?

A few explanations have been offered as to why this might be the case. One theory is simply that bilinguals benefit from a wider range of experiences than monolinguals because they operate in more than one languages and, often, within more than one culture. As a result, they have access to a wider range of ideas, which they can combine together to form new and novel ones.

One of the most appealing theories was suggested by Anatoliy Kharkhurin, a psychologist from the American University of Sharjah, in his book Multilingualism & Creativity. Kharkhurin points to the fact that, within our brains, all our knowledge of concepts and things is stored in a complex, interconnected semantic network. This network is known to have two layers or levels.

At the bottom level are the concepts themselves – things like DOG and CAT and CASTLE. Within this layer, related concepts are horizontally connected. For instance, the concepts DOG and CAT might be connected since both are quadrupeds and common household pets (and, between them, they account for the majority of the videos on Youtube). As a result, thinking about cats is likely to make you think about dogs too. The concepts DOG and CASTLE, on the other hand, are unlikely to be interconnected. So, thinking about dogs won’t immediately make you think about turrets and drawbridges.

In the next level up (the lexical level) are the linguistic labels for each of these concepts – for example, the words “cat”, “dog”, and “castle”. Importantly, the levels are vertically interconnected so that the concept CAT is connected to the lexical item “cat”, DOG is connected to “dog”, and CASTLE is connected to “castle”.

There are also further horizontal connections within the lexical level so that “dog” might be connected to words like “log” and “fog” because they each share two phonemes. As a result, if someone said to you the word “dog”, because of the various links in your semantic network, you might think about cats and logs. But you would be unlikely to think about castles.

That is, unless you also spoke French. Although bilinguals will still have only one set of concepts in the bottom layer of their semantic network, they will have two sets of linguistic labels in the next level up. So a French-English bilingual will have both “château” and “castle” connected to the concept CASTLE, and both “cat” and “chat” connected to the concept CAT. Therefore, if you said the word “dog” to a French-English bilingual it might make them think of cats, which might make them think of the word “chat”, which might make them think of the (phonetically related) word “château”, and therefore the concept CASTLE – a train of thought which just isn’t open to a monolingual speaker of English.

This process of language-mediated concept activation is one of the key processes, Kharkhurin proposes, behind the positive correlation between bilingualism and creativity. And, by way of a real life example of this process in action, here’s a passage Jack Kerouac wrote in his diary in February 1950:

“In my sleep I referred to myself, in French, not as “writer” but as arrangeur – he who arranges matters; at the same time, I associated this fraction with eating supper (manger). I woke up to remember this.”

So there you have it. On average, bilinguals are found to be more creative (linguistically and otherwise) than monolinguals, and there are some convincing theories for why this might be the case.

Of course, there’s far more to good writing than divergent thinking. But it seems fair to say that, if you aspire to be a successful novelist and you already speak a second language, then you’re off to a good start.

 

References

Kharkhurin, A. V., & Wei, L. (2015). The role of code-switching in bilingual creativity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 18(2), 153-169.
Landry, R. G. (1973). The Relationship of Second Language and Verbal Creativity. The Modern Language Journal, 57(3), 110-113.
Leikin, M. (2012). The effect of bilingualism on creativity: Developmental and educational perspectives. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(4), 431-447.

From William Shakespeare to Amy Tan: Do bilinguals make better writers? (1)

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IMG_7123Do bilinguals make better writers? Are people who speak more than one language better at carving out a sentence, finding an apt metaphor, or using words in new and exciting ways? Are they better at telling stories that move us, at presenting ideas that excite us, at rendering dialogue that speaks to us?

Or, in more scientific terms, is there any causal link between individual bilingualism and linguistic creativity?

Creativity more broadly – which can be defined as the ability to produce novel and useful ideas – is just one component of our mental capacities. There have been decades of debate as to whether bilingualism has any bearing on our cognitive capabilities and, over the years, the pendulum of evidence has swung back and forth.

At first, it was thought that kids who grew up speaking more than one language would be at an intellectual disadvantage over their monolingual counterparts. Then, a whole range of research emerged to suggest that there were instead potential cognitive advantages of being bilingual, particularly in terms of increased “executive control” – that is, the ability to focus on certain information while inhibiting others while undertaking certain specific tasks. (There is also evidence to suggest that being bilingual may reduce the risk of developing dementia in later life.) Now, the pendulum has swung back towards the middle ground, as some of the findings on the so-called bilingual advantage have been called into question.

But what about the more specific question of whether bilinguals are more creative, linguistically speaking?

Well, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that they indeed are. Just look at the bookshelves of your local library, or lists of the “greatest novels of all time”, and you’ll find plenty of bilingual authors.

First of all, there are those authors who grew up bilingual. Novelist and diarist, Anaïs Nin was of Cuban and French descent, grew up in both Paris and the US and, although Spanish was her first language, wrote her famous journals in French and then English. Of Henry Miller, she once wrote: “There are words in other tongues I must use when I talk about you. In my own, I think of: ardiente, salvaje, hombre.” At about the same time, Jack Kerouac was growing up in Massachusetts, but the language he spoke at home with his family was French-Canadian. Throughout his life, Kerouac was aware of his bi-cultural identity. In a diary entry from 1945, he congratulated himself for being at least “half American”. He also wrote: “Quand je suis fâché, je sacre souvent en français. Quand je dors, je rêve souvent en français” (“When I’m annoyed, I often swear in French. When I sleep, I often dream in French”).

Much contemporary, Western fiction represents the second- or third-generation immigrant experience of their bilingual authors – that of being between (and beyond) two or more languages and cultures. For example, Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was born in the Dominican Republic but raised in New Jersey. His novel, rich with Spanish-English code-switching starts as it means to go on:

“Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everyone’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.”

Fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Jhumpa Lahiri, was born in London to Bengali parents, and grew up in USA. Lahiri has bravely written her forthcoming novel in Italian, the language of the country in which she now lives. Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, was born in Afghanistan but emigrated to California with his family when he was 15. And Amy Tan, author The Joy Luck Club, was born in California, and raised bilingual, speaking English and Mandarin. She has written about how she makes use of all of her “Englishes” in writing her fiction, including the “broken” or “fractured” English (what linguists call the interlanguage) of her Chinese immigrant mother.

Then, there are the authors who grew up speaking languages other than English, but who ended up writing classic works of the English language. Perhaps most famously, Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in English, his second language after Polish. Nigerian novelists Chinua Achebe and Gabriel Okara wrote in English, albeit in an English that was deliberately tailored to their own, unique African identities. And I’ve written recently about contemporary author Xiaolu Guo, named one of Britain’s Best Young Novelists by Grant Magazine, who began writing in English because she couldn’t find translators to translate her novels from Chinese.

Then, there are native speakers of English, who wrote in English, but who learned other languages either at school or while living abroad – and whose experience in these languages had obvious influences on their work. Perhaps most prominently, William Shakespeare would have spent most of his time at grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon wrestling with the six noun cases of Latin. Shakespeare wrote whole passages of his plays in French, and was rare among Elizabethan playwrights to do so. Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois, but spent most of his life outside of the US, living in Paris and Cuba and elsewhere. His writing is littered with Italian, French and Spanish. In The Old Man And The Sea, for example, the novella which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature, Hemingway alludes to the Cuban setting:

“But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky […].”

Another example is Cormac McCarthy, who was born in Rhode Island, but who lived for a while in Ibiza. His classic Blood Meridian is similarly sprinkled with Spanish words and Spanish dialogue. In fact, the list of famous English-language authors that spent significant amounts of time living in non English-speaking countries is remarkably long. James Joyce wrote mostly about Dublin, but lived for most of his life outside of Ireland – in Trieste, Zurich, and in Paris, where Ulysses was first published. George Orwell famously went Down And Out In Paris And London, and wrote about his experiences. Capturer of post-war, kitchen-sink life (and fellow Nottingham-lad) Alan Sillitoe lived for six years in France and Spain, writing Saturday Night, Sunday Morning in Majorca. And, another famous writer from Nottingham, D H Lawrence, spent most of his life in voluntary exile, in Europe and elsewhere.

Then, there are authors who have looked to dead languages to spice up their fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, was famously a scholar of Anglo-Saxon. Sticking to the world of fantasy and science-fiction, Frank Herbert borrowed heavily from a variety of languages, including French and Arabic, to find the new words he needed for his Dune universe. And George R. R. Martin may not be a linguist himself, but he still shows a remarkable sensitivity to multilingualism in his world of Dragons and White Walkers.

Of course, this list doesn’t include authors writing in languages other than English. For example, Alexander Pushkin was the Russian language’s first great poet, but he grew up speaking French with his parents, like most Russian aristocrats of the time, and only learned Russian vernacular from servants. Marcel Proust spoke English, even if not fluently. In A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, for example, he makes code-switching to English a particular affectation of Odette, Swann’s lover and later wife.

And, of course, this is a pretty Western-centric selection. However, if you were to look at the bookshelves of China, or India, or South America, I’m sure you would find a similar story – or possibly an even greater prominence of bilingual authors.

What I’ve presented so far is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that there is a link between bilingualism and linguistic creativity – in crude terms, that speaking more than one language, does indeed make you a better writer.

But, of course, such evidence is hardly scientific. It hardly points to a measurable, quantifiable correlation between bilingualism and linguistic creativity.

And, even as anecdotal evidence, presenting a list of famous bilingual authors is problematic in other ways too. What I could have done instead, to try and argue the opposite case, is to present a list of famous authors who are certifiable monolingual. But finding anyone, even in ostensibly monolingual countries like the US and the UK, who doesn’t have some degree of proficiency in a foreign language like French or Spanish is actually pretty difficult. That’s important because, with the list above, I’m not making any distinction between people who have grown up with two different languages, those that learned a second language at school, and those that have lived with a second language abroad. All, of course, reflect slightly different flavours of being “bilingual” and – inseparable from this – different levels of individual experience with more than one culture. You could certainly ask, if it exists at all, where does the “bilingual effect” on creativity start and end?

Importantly, even if there is a correlation between linguistic creativity and bilingualism, that doesn’t prove any kind of direct causation – that being bilingual causes people to be more creative writers.

For example, for the authors who learned languages later in life, what’s to say that the thing that drove them to move abroad and learn foreign languages wasn’t the same thing that drove them to write fiction – that is, some deeper love of language? What’s to say the two things aren’t just facets of the same phenomenon that inspires me to write this blog, for example, or that Amy Tan wrote about in her essay Mother Tongue?:

“I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language – the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade.”

But even if the causation is not clear, the correlation is interesting enough. And it turns out there is scientific evidence, from research in psychology and linguistics, to suggest that there really is a positive correlation between bilingualism and creativity.

And that’s going to be the subject of the next part of this blog.

Forget Hemingway: This Is How A Linguist Would Write Dialogue

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IMG_6834Anyone who has ever sat down to write fiction will know that dialogue is one of the hardest things to write.

That’s partly because speech is so complex. Language works at a variety of levels: phonological (at the level of accent), lexical (the words used), morphosyntactic (the grammar), prosodic (the tone, stress and rhythm), discourse (how multiple phrases and sentences are combined), pragmatic (how meaning is influenced by context), and even paralinguistic (the nonverbal signs and cues, such as hand gestures and facial expressions, that often occur alongside speech). When we talk, we convey meaning at all of these levels simultaneously – and not just in terms of what we say, but also in terms of how we say it.

Let’s take for example a very simple sentence, “you want a cake”. How I say that sentence to you will substantially change the information I convey. For example, if I increase the pitch of my voice towards the end of the sentence (a change in prosody), I will be asking you a question: “you want a cake?”. If I don’t, I will probably be making some sort of statement about how hungry you are. If I raise the amplitude of my voice, I might be telling you that I’m angry with you. If I say the sentence in a Scottish accent (a change at the level phonology), I will be telling you something about where I am from. If I speak in Received Pronunciation, I will be telling something about my social class. If I change the word “cake” to “petite madeleine” (a change, at the lexical level, in what linguists call “register”) I will be telling you something about my culinary knowledge, and so on.

In general, whatever choices I make across these various linguistic levels, when I say something as simple as “you want a cake”, I can’t help but tell you something about my identity – a topic which is still of great interest to linguists.

Things get even more complex when two or more people are speaking. First of all, real people don’t tend to talk to each other in complete sentences. Instead, they talk in fragments of sentences or phrases, or often just in single words. Moreover, real life dialogue doesn’t tend to be “she said, he said”. People do tend to take what linguists call “turns” in conversation, following some fairly fundamental rules of conversation, but quite often these turns overlap when multiple speakers speak at once.

It’s exactly this richness and complexity of everyday language that makes it such an interesting topic for researchers and linguists. And, as it turns out, capturing and representing the complexity of dialogue is as much a challenge for the linguist as it is for the novelist.

Novel writers take a myriad of approaches to rendering dialogue, differing in how they approach the degree of complexity. Some authors wilfully choose to ignore it. Ernest Hemingway, for example, takes a famously minimalist approach. In the dialogue of A Farewell To Arms, there’s little or no information about the levels of prosody or phonology. Instead, as a reader, you are left to create these for yourself from what you know about the characters:

‘You are all her dear boys,’ Catherine said. ‘She prefers the dear boys. Listen to it rain.’
‘It’s raining hard.’
‘And you’ll always love me, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the rain won’t make a difference?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good. Because I’m afraid of the rain.’

In her novel The Keep, author Jennifer Egan takes this minimalism to another level. She eschews reporting phrases (like “he said” and “she replied”) entirely. Instead, the speech is stripped to the bare bones and presented like screenplay dialogue:

Danny: Shit. Where the hell is he?
Rafe: Could be right underneath us.

Here, the only information beyond the levels of words and grammar is the question mark, which indicates (at the prosodic level) a rise in pitch at the end of Danny’s utterance. You do get some sense of the identity of the speakers (his use of “shit” indicates that Danny probably isn’t a catholic priest), but you don’t know what accent the characters are speaking in, if they are speaking quickly or slowly, if they are whispering, and so on.

Punctuation in English is fairly limited. As a result, beyond marking questions (?) or exclamations (!), it’s pretty difficult to really show how characters are speaking. Instead, many authors resort to telling us how they are speaking. Although Stephen King is famously not a fan of the adverb, it is a convenient way to elaborate the manner of speech. For example, take this dialogue from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The adverb “decisively” suggests to me perhaps accelerated speech and a stress on the “not”:

The driver for the second taxi said:
‘Like to sit inside while you’re waiting?’
Vera said decisively:
‘Not at all.’

Older authors, however, do a lot more telling in their writing. In this bit of dialogue from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, wealthy manufacturer Josiah Bounderby is talking to his housekeeper, Mrs Sparsit. Here, Dickens makes much more of an effort to capture the complexity of the speech, especially using adverb phrases (such as “in a highly superior manner”). Moreover, in Mrs Sparsit’s second turn, stress is indicated by the use of italics:

“I wish with all my heart, Sir,” said Mrs. Sparsit, in a highly superior manner; somehow she seemed, in a moment, to have established a right to pity him ever afterwards; “that you may be in all respects very happy.”
“Well, ma’am,” returned Bounderby, with some resentment in his tone: which was clearly lowered, though in spite of himself, “I am obliged to you. I hope I shall be.”
“Do you, Sir?” said Mrs Sparsit, with great affability. “But naturally you do: of course you do.”
A very awkward pause on Mr. Bounderby’s part succeeded. Mrs. Sparsit sedately resumed her work and occasionally gave a small cough, which sounded like the cough of conscious strength and forbearance.
“Well, ma’am,” resumed Bounderby […]

The dialogue here is clearly much richer, especially in its description of prosodic features. Still, because of Dickens’ use of standardised spelling, there’s still little information about what’s happening at the phonological level – that is, about accent and, for example, the regional or social backgrounds of the two characters. This is in contrast to this final excerpt, from Story In Harlem Slang by Zora Neale Hurston, in which the dialect (“de family”) is deliberately rendered using phonetic spelling:

“Sweet Buck, you fixing to talk out of place.” Jelly stiffened.
“If you trying to jump salty, Jelly, that’s your mammy.”
“Don’t play in de family, Sweet Back. I don’t play de dozens. I done told you.”

Of course, the more information writers include in their dialogue about what’s happening at the various linguistic levels, the harder it will be to read. There is an inevitable trade-off between accuracy and readability, detail and clarity. But, whether or not you like it from a stylistic point of view, it’s clear that Dickens’ and Hurston’s prose is richer linguistically, for example, than Hemingway’s.

It turns out that linguists have to a very similar problem to address when they are trying to transcribe speech data – both for the research itself and then, ultimately, for presentation in books and journals for other linguists to look at. Usually, what details linguists will record in their written transcriptions will depend on what linguistic features, at what linguistic levels, they are interested in.

For example, the following is a basic transcription of a conversation I recorded for my own Masters thesis. In it, a group of scientists are discussing potential research project ideas (and having a playful joke about the more existential aspects of quantum theory at the same time):

Ben:     Quantum states first maybe?
Anne:  Yeah.
Pete:    It’s a good one.
Sam:    We all want to be the author of ‘On The Ontology of Quantum States’
Pete:    Confirmation
Sam:    You need to be, like, you need to speak in French and smoke as you explain.

If you were, say, a lexicographer interested in word usage, this sort of transcription might be enough. However, it’s clear that this very basic transcription ignores lots of information about the other levels of language: of phonology, prosody, and so on.

For example, if you were a linguist who was particularly interested in accents and dialects, you could instead transcribe the data phonetically (using the International Phonetic Alphabet). Then, you’d be able to see from his pronunciation of the first vowel sound in “quantum” that Ben isn’t, for example, from North America.

Ben:     kwɒn.təm steɪts fɜːst meɪ.bi
Anne:  jeə […]

One of the most common transcription systems for analysing this sort of dialogue is called Jefferson notation. Used particularly by linguists and sociologists interested in “conversational analysis”, Jefferson notation is less concerned about phonological features. Instead, it is much more interested in capturing prosodic features of speech (of stress and intonation), as well as information about how the various speakers are interacting: that is, whether they are politely taking turns, constantly interrupting each other, all speaking at once, and so on.

By way of an illustration, this is what the dialogue looks like transcribed in Jefferson notation:

Ben:     quantum states first °↑maybe°
Anne:  yeah=
Pete:    =it’s a good one
Sam:    we all want to be the author of (.) >on the ontology< of quantum states
((laughter))
Pete:    confir er (.) confirmation=
Sam:    =you need to be like you need to speak in Fre:nch and smoke as you explai:n
((laughter))

Words in small circles (e.g. “°maybe°”) mean they are more softly spoken. Words in capital letters are spoken more loudly. Dots in parentheses indicate a small pause, but an equals signs (“yeah=”) means that there is no pause between one speaker’s turn and the next. Words in inward facing brackets (“>on the ontology<”) are spoken more quickly. A colon indicates a lengthening of the relevant syllable. And, finally, paralinguistic information (about laughter, for example) is put in double parentheses.

Inevitably, the transcription looks pretty complex, and is hardly easy to read. And it would get more complicated still if you tried to capture the phonological information in the same transcription! The point is that, whether you are a novelist or a linguist, it’s essentially impossible to capture all the complexity of speech on paper. And, even if you did manage it, the result would be essentially unreadable. All you can do is focus on the particular linguistic levels you are most interested in – or, if you are a novelist, the linguistic features of the dialogue your readers to focus on.

That’s not to say that, one day, some pioneering novelist won’t write all of their dialogue in Jefferson notation (and Jack Kerouac, for example, got some way towards that in Visions of Cody). Whether or not the result would be a bestseller, of course, is an entirely different question.

Incidentally, this is what Dickens passage would look like if a linguist had written it:

Spars:   I wish with all my heart sir that you may be in all respects very happy
Bound: well ↓ma’am (.) I am obliged to you (0.6) I hope I shall be
Spars:   DO you sir? (.) But naturally you do (.) >of course you do<
(1.2)
((Spars resumes work))
Spars:   ((coughs twice)) (1.3) ((coughs))
(0.5)
Bound: well ma’am

And, just for fun, here’s what the conversation between the four scientists might look like in a more literary form…:

They stood huddled around the flipchart. Pen firmly in hand, Pete looked to his colleagues. He wore a look of focus, ready as he was to capture their thoughts.
Ben spoke first.
‘Quantum states first maybe?’ he suggested, his voice trailing off meekly as he spoke.
‘Yeah,’ said Anne.
‘It’s a good one,’ agreed Pete. He began to write.
Then, Sam spoke. ‘We all want to be the author of… On The Ontology Of Quantum States,’ he joked.
A flurry of laughter erupted, and then subsided.
‘Confir, er, confirmation,’ suggested Pete, trying to stick to the job in hand.
But Sam continued. ‘You need to be, like, you need to speak French,’ he said, chuckling. ‘And smoke as you explain…’

(The names of the scientists in the transcription have been changed to maintain their anonymity.)